Description
Book SynopsisHere 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 Atlanti
Trade ReviewRead Bernstein's book if you can. It's both a reminder of how fallible the Founding Fathers were--and yet how good they still look to us nearly a quarter of a millennium later. * Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic *
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; I. The History that Made the Founding Fathers ; The State of the Union ; Free-Born English Subjects ; The Intellectual World ; II. The History that the Founding Fathers Made ; Independence ; Constitution-Making ; Federalism ; Politics ; Church and State ; Equality, Inequality, and Slavery ; America in the World ; Part III. What History Made of the Founding Fathers ; Ancestor Worship? ; "Which Founding Father Are You?" ; The Dead Hand of the Past: Original Intent ; Conclusion ; Notes ; Chronology ; Further Reading
