Darren Staloff teaches history at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts.
"A lucid argument, usefully extending the intellectual history of the American Revolution by interrogating three great revolutionaries." --Kirkus Reviews"Thoughtful, infectious in its enthusiasm, and briskly argued." --Leslie Kitchen, History News Network
By now it's commonplace to ascribe the principles of the American founding to the Enlightenment, and CUNY historian Staloff offers no startling new information or refreshingly original readings of this period. He contends that the epistemological turn to empiricism, the disenchantment with the metaphysical and the move toward urbanism provide the core of Enlightenment politics, and he uncritically uses these three principles as lenses through which to read the politics of three of America's founders: Hamilton, Adams and Jefferson. Hamilton "promoted rapid industrialization and urban growth fostered by a strong central government capable of projecting its interests and power in the world at large." While Adams shared with John Locke an optimism that scientific education could promote liberty, he knew too well that human nature was corrupt enough to need a political system with checks and balances. Staloff (The Making of an American Thinking Class) gives his most thoughtful readings to Jefferson, who he says fostered a Romantic sensibility in American politics. Jefferson, he says, most changed American politics by showing the need for those politics to be built on an idealistic vision. But among a continuing flood of books about these and other American founders, Staloff's provides little that is new or provocative. (July 4) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
"A lucid argument, usefully extending the intellectual history of the American Revolution by interrogating three great revolutionaries." --Kirkus Reviews"Thoughtful, infectious in its enthusiasm, and briskly argued." --Leslie Kitchen, History News Network
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