The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History) |  | Author: Steven Watts
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 347724
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 406
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.8 x 1.1
ISBN: 0801839416
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.5
EAN: 9780801839412
ASIN: 0801839416
Publication Date: August 1, 1989
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Condition: Square, tight, clean unmarked text, mild cover rub & edge wear, light page tan, solid clean read copy
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| Customer Reviews:
 Ambitious and largely successful November 27, 2005
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I sometimes wonder reading other reviews on Amazon if I have read the same book as the other reviewers. This is one of those cases. I feel compelled in part to write this review because I feel the Mr. Kaplan's review gives the wrong impression of the book.
Watts is interested in the transition that occurred in the early decades of the nineteenth century. We went from an American politics based on deference to the leadership of a virtuous elite to the politics of the self-directed individual competing in interest group politics. At the same time (and hardly coincidently) we became a recognizably capitalist economy. These transitions necessitated a change in the dominant explanatory
cultural ideologies. Watts' book is not about what caused the War of 1812. It is about how a culture adapts to economic and political changes. It is about how that adaptation is created by individual actors and, in turn, how that adaptation changes those individuals. Finally, it is about how a particular event, the War of 1812, acted as a catalyst for the change. Watt sees these transitions as wrenching for the culture and disturbing for the individual.
What is unique about his approach to these issues is that he decided to explore this period from the point of view of individual biography. The themes of the book are explored in four chapters each of which is centered around three biographical essays of individual Americans. The idea is to "capture the man in the historical moment, using each to illuminate the hidden characteristics of the other" (p.xxi).
The first chapter deals with the social aftermath of the Revolution and the Constitutional period. These 20 years initiated many changes that sounded the death knoll of traditional civic humanist republicanism with its politics of deference. These changes are outlined amid essays on the lives of John Taylor of Caroline, John Adams and Hugh Henry Breckinridge.
The second chapter deals with how we created a new civic philosophy (or "civicism") through essays on Phillip Freneau, Henry Clay, and Charles J. Ingersoll.
We have always seen ourselves as being different politically. We have even seen our politics as having a religious mission, i.e., to serve as the City on the Hill, as the guiding light of righteous politics to the world. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, it seemed to many Americans as if we had lost our way. We were merely a mob of self-made men striving for riches without any moral or social purpose. Watt's third chapter explores how we rewove the threads of our religious and political lives and does so through looking at the lives of Spencer Cone, Benjamin Rush and Mason Weems.
The fourth chapter of biographical essays is, to my reading, the weakest. Here Watts explores the psychological costs of this social transformations in the lives of Charles Brockden Brown, Alfred Brunson and John Quincy Adams. If there is any branch of history that is sketchier to my thinking then psychohistory, I haven't come across it yet. It totally depends on the reader buying into the same psychological theory as the author.
Watt feels that individuals felt adrift from the loss of authority in the culture. For sometime, we had known who to look to for leadership, for guidance, and discipline. In this period, individuals were left to their own devices as many of the sources of authority came under democratic challenge. For many, it was a struggle to relocate their moral center.
Some individuals split into multiple centers (or "masks"), each of which was used in certain situations. Watt uses Horkheimer's concept of the "personae" as his central explanatory concept (p.170) in this chapter. I guess my qualms about this chapter can be summarized as my qualms about the concept of an intergrated personality but that's just me. Other reader's may well find Watt to be totally convincing in this chapter.
The final two chapters of the book look at how the War of 1812 quickened some of these transformational processes and solidified a new variant of Jeffersonian republicanism.
Personally, I found this book to be quite brilliant, especially in its approach. Watt has gone on to write full biographies, e.g., of Walt Disney. My only regret is that he seems not to have followed through on a project to continue his exploration of the cultural cost of the development of liberal capitalism with his projected sequel to this book.
This book gives us not only an insight into historical method but important insights into an infinitely fascinating period in our history. And it does all that by giving us flesh and blood people whom we come to know and from whom we can learn. My thanks to Professor Watts for his efforts.
 Ambitious but flawed July 18, 2000
3 out of 15 found this review helpful
Despite his stated aim to explore the effects of the War of 1812, Steven Watts' book fails to do so and mainly contributes to the old debate about the war's causes.
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