Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions

American Political Thought

by Alan Gibson

The first edition of Alan Gibson’s Understanding the Founding is widely regarded as an invaluable guide to the last century’s key debates surrounding America’s founding. This new edition retains all of the strengths of the original while adding a substantial new section addressing a major but previously unaddressed issue and also significantly revising Gibson’s invaluable conclusion and bibliography.

In the original edition, which built upon his previous work in Interpreting the Founding, Gibson addressed four key questions: Were the Framers motivated by their economic interests? How democratic was the Framers’ Constitution? Should we interpret the Founding using philosophical or strictly historical approaches? What traditions of political thought were most important to the Framers? He focused especially on the preconceptions that scholars brought to these questions, explored the deepest sources of scholars’ disagreements over them, and suggested new and thoughtful lines of interpretation and inquiry. His incisive analysis brought clarity to the complex and sprawling debates and shed new light on the institutional and intellectual foundations of the American political system.

Gibson has now added a path-breaking new chapter entitled “How Could They Have Done That? Founding Scholarship and the Question of Moral Responsibility,” which reprises and critiques one of the most important and most vexing contemporary debates on the American founding. The new chapter focuses on how the men who fought a revolution in the name of liberty and declared to the world that “all men are created equal” could have supported the institution of slavery and even owned slaves themselves, accepted the legal and social subordination of women, and been responsible for Indian removal and genocide against Native Americans. Efforts to criticize or defend the Founders on these issues now constitute a daunting body of scholarship addressing what David Brion Davis has called the “dilemmas of slaveholding revolutionaries.” Gibson’s astute and fair-minded analysis of this scholarship offers keen insights into how we might move toward more mature and responsible evaluations of the Founders.

Genres: History

430 pages, Paperback

First published April 19, 2007

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

In summarizing five critical debates that have surrounded America’s founding, Alan Gibson creates an unbiased, scholarly handbook invaluable to anyone interested in examining scholarship regarding the original intent of the US Constitution. Focusing on such debates regarding the economic motives of the Founders, their perceived moral and democratic responsibilities, and their success in constructing a document based on novel political theory, Gibson informs readers while providing a guide to the different frameworks of interpretation that have surrounded the study of such debates. Illustrating how and why the debates have unfolded as they have, Gibson suggests ways in which we can move past the cycle of condemnation and celebration of the Founders towards a more detached and complex view of their works and ideas. Ultimately, Gibson argues that this is important due to the fact that such scholarly debates continue to reflect and shape how we identify ourselves as American and understand the nature of our political system.

[Elizabeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate this book. I hate it I hate it I hate it. This should be exciting on two counts: the Founding is AWESOME and historian bitchfights are AWESOME. But no. Every sentence in this book is painful. Every word.

It is possible to write historiography in such a way that it is not mind-bendingly boring. Gibson does not have the knack. Gibson, in fact, has the magic power of BORING. I swear I understand less than I did before I started reading this.

[Craig Bolton]

Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions (American Political Thought) by Alan Gibson (2007)