The Founding Fathers Reconsidered

Here is a vividly written and compact overview of the brilliant, flawed, and quarrelsome group of lawyers, politicians, merchants, military men, and clergy known as the "Founding Fathers"--who got as close to the ideal of the Platonic "philosopher-kings" as American or world history has ever seen.

In The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, R. B. Bernstein reveals Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and the other founders not as shining demigods but as imperfect human beings--people much like us--who nevertheless achieved political greatness. They emerge here as men who sought to transcend their intellectual world even as they were bound by its limits, men who strove to lead the new nation even as they had to defer to the great body of the people and learn with them the possibilities and limitations of politics. Bernstein deftly traces the dynamic forces that molded these men and their contemporaries as British colonists in North America and as intellectual citizens of the Atlantic civilization's Age of Enlightenment. He analyzes the American Revolution, the framing and adoption of state and federal constitutions, and the key concepts and problems--among them independence, federalism, equality, slavery, and the separation of church and state--that both shaped and
circumscribed the founders' achievements as the United States sought its place in the world.


Author: R. B. Bernstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 05/05/2009
Pages: 238
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.80w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780195338324


Award: George Washington Book Prize - Finalist


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 04/15/2009 pg. 100
Chronicle of Higher Education 05/15/2009 pg. 20
Choice 03/01/2010

About the Author

R. B. Bernstein, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law at New York Law School, has written, edited, or co-edited nineteen books on American constitutional and legal history, including Thomas Jefferson.



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