Search results for ""Author Christopher M. Duncan""

The group known as the Southern Agrarians came out of Vanderbilt University in the wake of the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. In response to attacks on the South and Southern culture, these scholars and poets-including Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Frank Owsley, and others-turned their attention to the defense of the South and its political tradition in numerous essays and books. Christopher Duncan's Fugitive Theory situates the Agrarians' political thought within the larger context of the Western political tradition in general and in the context of American political thought in particular. Duncan argues that the political theory of the Southern Agrarians is best understood in terms of a civic republicanism that has its roots in the thought of theorists such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, James Harrington, and Thomas Jefferson. In exploring this fascinating chapter of twentieth-century American history Duncan recovers a vision that included a commitment to private property in land, autonomy, and decentralized power-a vision that pitted itself against the call for centralization and materialism implicit in the ascendant industrial order.

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This book presents the "forgotten" thought of the Anti-Federalists as an important alternative to the Federalist tradition in American political history. In tracing Anti-Federalist concepts from their origins in prerevolutionary Congregationalist theology through to the writing of the U.S. Constitution, Duncan shows that Anti-Federalist theory underscores the religious, localist, and communitarian origins of the American political tradition. He argues that the Anti-Federalists were indeed the true representatives of the American Revolution and the political arrangements that resulted from it - men of a localist, communitarian faith in which political participation is an end in itself rather than a means to other objectives. As such, he concludes, the course bolstered by the Anti-Federalists represents a viable "road not taken" in America's national heritage.Duncan challenges the dominant view among scholars of the American Anti-Federalists and counters the impression that the Anti-Federalists were liberals whose fear of government and power left them unable to articulate and to construct a lasting political association. Duncan shows that the Anti-Federalists engaged in a rigorous defense of republican political community and its associate ideal of public happiness, in contrast to the liberal ideal of private happiness expressed by their Federalist counterparts.The Anti-Federalists and Early American Political Thought offers insights into a tradition of American political discourse that is relevant to contemporary arguments within political theory. The book will be of interest to students of political philosophy, American government and politics, and early American history.

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