| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750–1850. Ed. by Jürgen Heideking and James A. Henretta. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. x, 309 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-521-80066-8.)

This volume suffers from the typical problems of edited volumes. The essays do not all fit together, and they are uneven in quality. The volume, however, has one thing going for it that other volumes in this area of research do not: its comparative perspective. The essays purport to compare intellectual developments during the 1750–1850 period in the German states and the United States. Collectively, they challenge the old shibboleth of American exceptionalism by showing how contemporaneous German political debates can be recast within a similar liberal-republican dynamic.

Having said that, this volume could have been improved by more internal dialogue between the essays. As is, its comparative perspective is more in the aggregate than in the individual essays. Only three of the fourteen essays engage in an extended comparative analysis of the German and American cases. Only seven of the essays even make some kind of comparative statement about the two cases. Only one of the essays directly contests the American exceptionalism thesis.

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