Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
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Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
500
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
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Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
20,911
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
Assessing the problem of necessity in politics and morality is a good place to begin our review of The Federalist because The Federalist itself begins with this problem. The opening paragraph of the work introduces the dichotomy facing Americans over the question of ratification. In Publius’ words Americans had the option “of establishing good government from reflection...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
18,394
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
The last chapter examined the foundations in principle of The Federalist’s constitutionalism. That constitutionalism was anchored in the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence. In Federalists 2–8 we begin to...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
13,762
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
The last two chapters have discussed The Federalist’s natural rights constitutionalism and certain elements of its commercial republican theory that might be improved with the Constitution. Part of the argument here is that the Constitution would be a means to national greatness and the higher toning of American character through the political and...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
8,558
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
The spirit of commerce was an animated spirit that could indeed provide energy to the private sphere, as Agrippa had suggested. But on The Federalist’s reading it was also a spirit that could be belligerent and warlike, one that had led nations to use military force to attempt to acquire both territory and dominion over others, and this frequently at the cost of their own...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
17,528
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
As the last chapter indicated, The Federalist embraces a theory of commercial republicanism that challenges the orthodoxy of Enlightenment political thinking that commercial societies, particularly commercial republics, were moderate or...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
12,026
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
How then might we take the lessons from Thucydides and apply them to The Federalist? What exactly do we have to learn here? To recapitulate, the emphasis on the spirited, even warlike character of commercial republics that occupies the early Federalist numbers provides us a clue about how The Federalist will turn the tables on traditional republican theory...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
13,117
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
Federalist 10 proposes that individual rights are private in nature. They are private because in a strict legal sense they generally apply only to those matters over which individuals have exclusive control: property, contracts, claims of negligence, even such things as the right to vote, which...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
16,493
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
The last two chapters have presented Federalists 9–14 as complementary numbers. Federalists 11–14 emphasized how the development of commerce and enterprise under the Constitution would assist that first governmental object announced in Federalist 10 of protecting men’s faculties. The Constitution would protect those faculties and assist...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
10,952
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
Federalist 19 identified self-government with self-defense. If a nation could not defend itself it could not be self-governing. Like The Federalist’s admonition against the use of foreign arms, the identification of self-government with self-defense was offered up as a permanent feature of politics, as necessary in ancient times as it was in modernity. It was also a...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
15,153
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
My focus at the end of the last chapter was on two themes: the creation of a national free market as a moral and a military imperative, and Publius’ idea about how a new American nationalism might be nurtured through improved confidence in the federal government and commercial enterprise. These themes are developed throughout the first...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
16,117
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
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Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
20,730
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
5,108
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
7,982
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
1,371
Description: Vindicating the Commercial Republic
Anthony A. Peacock is professor and head of the Department of Political Science at Utah State University. He is also the director of USU’s Center for the Study of American Constitutionalism. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including, most recently, How to Read The Federalist Papers (2010), Freedom and the Rule of Law (2010), and Deconstructing the...
Anthony A. Peacock
Lexington Books
204