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Reviews
Reviews
Mandell successfully recovers the often obscured legacy of economic equality and moral economy that emerged from the English Civil War, as it informed debates about proper republican polity during the American Revolution... Highly recommended.
Widening economic inequality has been one of the most striking and significant problems facing the United States during the past half-century... Mandell's useful book belongs on the reading lists of the scholars, elected officials, and others who will be engaged with figuring out a path ahead.
Specialists and researchers will find Mandell's sophisticated and insightful analysis deeply engaging, yet the book's writing is so clear that it could be assigned to advanced undergraduates. The fact that economic inequality is one of the great issues of the twenty-first century makes Lost Tradition especially timely and important.
Mandell usefully recovers the many and varied attempts to forge a link between economic and political equality in American culture from colonial times to the Reconstruction era, and he reminds readers that there have been numerous cries for greater economic justice since.
Tracing the concept of economic equality among individuals and families in the United States with clarity and consistency, Mandell transcends the distinctions usually made among intellectual, social, and economic history. Addressing both theory and practice, he succeeds in writing for both his fellow scholars and a larger literate, curious public.
This book provides an insightful look at a timely topic: the various movements and strands of thought promoting economic equality in early American history.
This deeply researched story of the interplay between America's Revolutionary commitment to upholding individual rights and creating a society of equals supplies the foundation for grasping the nation's current turmoil over economic and political inequality. Mandell explains how providing poor men with equal access to voting came to sanction great disparities of wealth after the Civil War. This challenged Americans' longstanding belief that their republic required a broad, relatively equal distribution of wealth.
Daniel R. Mandell's sweeping and magisterial history of egalitarian economic ideas and policies in the American tradition teaches us how tightly bound Americans once understood political equality and economic egalitarianism to be. He adds to the historical record a new indictment of the post-Reconstruction era—it severed that close link. As Americans now wrestle collectively with how to tackle historically high levels of wealth and income inequality, Mandell's book opens a vista into a vast and inspiring array of conceptual frameworks in stark contrast to those that have dominated recent decades of economic thought.
In this deeply relevant work of historical excavation, Daniel Mandell highights what he rightly calls the 'lost tradition' of economic equality in America. Drawing on top-down sources and bottom-up social movements, he has written a wide-ranging and original examination of ideas of and disputes about equality from post-Reformation England and Scotland through the Reconstruction era. From the treatment of canonical thinkers like John Locke to little-known radicals like Philadelphia shoemaker William Heighton, Mandell provides an engaging analysis of evolving ideas about the relationship between economic and political equality and how, after the Reconstruction era, that tradition became obscured. This careful and compelling history is at the same time a work of searching moral inquiry.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6.125
x 9.25
Pages
328
ISBN
9781421437118
Illustration Description
13 b&w illus.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. English Origins
Chapter 2. Indians and Anglo-American Egalitarianism
Chapter 3. Revolutionary Ideologies and Regulations
Chapter 4. Wealth and Power in the Early
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. English Origins
Chapter 2. Indians and Anglo-American Egalitarianism
Chapter 3. Revolutionary Ideologies and Regulations
Chapter 4. Wealth and Power in the Early Republic
Chapter 5. Raising Republican Children
Chapter 6. Clashes over America's Political Economy
Chapter 7. Separating Property and Polity
Chapter 8. Reviving the Tradition
Chapter 9. Reconstruction and the Rejection of Economic Equality
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Featured Contributor
Daniel R. Mandell
Daniel R. Mandell is a professor of history at Truman State University. He is the author of Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts, King Philip's War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, End of Indian Sovereignty, and Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts, and The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870.Resources
