The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty: How Americans Resisted Modern State, 1765-1850

Summary

This book presents the case that the origins of American liberty should not be sought in the constitutional-reformist feats of its statesmen during the 1780s, but rather in the political and social resistance to their efforts. There were two revolutions occurring in the late 18th century America: the modern European revolution in favour of government, pursuing national unity, energetic government and centralization of power (what scholars usually dub American founding ); and a conservative, reactionary counter-revolution in favour of liberty, defending local rights and liberal individualism against the encroaching political authority. This is a book about this liberal counter-revolution and its ideological, political and cultural sources and central protagonists. The central analytical argument of the book is that America before the Revolution was a stateless, spontaneous political order that evolved culturally, politically and economically in isolation from the modern European trends of state-building and centralization of power. The book argues, then, that a better model for understanding America is a decoupled modernization hypothesis, in which social modernity is divested from the politics of modern state and tied with the pre-modern social institutions.