| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law. By John Fabian Witt. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. 406 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02360-4.)

Patriots and Cosmopolitans is an engaging, provocative history of law and American nationhood. The book is composed of four essays, each exploring key turning points in the nation's history through the struggles of particular individuals to deploy and shape the nation's institutions and values. The stories John Fabian Witt tells are so engrossing and well written that the reader may forget the overarching theme yoking the essays together. But Witt skillfully brings the reader back to his central point at each story's end, arguing that the development of American nationhood has been characterized by "bounded contingency." The political and legal institutions and sentiments that have animated the American nation have been so capacious that individuals have been able to articulate many competing visions of the nation; yet, Witt stresses, the nation provided a frame of reference that constrained and shaped individuals' conceptions and limited the arguments they could make.

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