Details

ISBN-10: 0226829332
ISBN-13: 9780226829333
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 10/27/2023
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.62" H

America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life

Paperback

Price: $25.00

Overview

America’s Philosopher examines how John Locke has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted over three centuries of American history.

The influence of polymath philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) can still be found in a dizzying range of fields, as his writings touch on issues of identity, republicanism, and the nature of knowledge itself. Claire Rydell Arcenas’s new book tells the story of Americans’ longstanding yet ever-mutable obsession with this English thinker’s ideas, a saga whose most recent manifestations have found the so-called Father of Liberalism held up as a right-wing icon.

The first book to detail Locke’s trans-Atlantic influence from the eighteenth century until today, America’s Philosopher shows how and why interpretations of his ideas have captivated Americans in ways few other philosophers–from any nation–ever have. As Arcenas makes clear, each generation has essentially remade Locke in its own image, taking inspiration and transmuting his ideas to suit the needs of the particular historical moment. Drawing from a host of vernacular sources to illuminate Locke’s often contradictory impact on American daily and intellectual life from before the Revolutionary War to the present, Arcenas delivers a pathbreaking work in the history of ideas.

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Reviews
"Clearly argued and written. . . . Arcenas convincingly demonstrates that colonists looked to Locke for guidance on matters involving child rearing and self-development, knowledge and its foundation, ways to read the Bible, and moral education, not so much as a guide to political principles. The text that early and mid-twentieth-century historians and political theorists such as Merle Curti, Carl Becker and Louis Hartz defined as the core of Lockean philosophy, the Two Treatises of Government, was not unknown to colonists, but it took a decided backseat to the Locke who reinvented the human mind, and when colonists went looking for political principles, Locke also took a backseat to Montesquieu and many others."– "Modern Intellectual History"
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Details

ISBN-10: 0226829332
ISBN-13: 9780226829333
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 10/27/2023
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.62" H
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