Archive for Joseph R. Stromberg

Joseph Stromberg is an independent historian and writer living in northern Georgia .

The Twisted Tree of Progressivism

Sorting out the Progressive movement and its constituent ideologies can be difficult in that the very term “progressive” is burdened with contested meanings. Rather than work along lines agreeable to presently out-of-office politicians hoping to regain power by denouncing long-dead Progressives, we begin with some deep background. One portent of Progressivism is found in the [...]

30Nov2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 24 comments | Continued

The Gilded Age: A Modest Revision

Mark Twain named the decades after 1865 the “Gilded Age,” and Progressive historian Vernon Louis Parrington sketched them in some detail in 1927. For Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought, volume 3), the Gilded Age was a “Great Barbecue” of continuous government largesse and State-assisted capital accumulation under a very simple philosophy: “[P]reemption [of land] meant exploitation [...]

21Sep2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 4 comments | Continued

Civil War and the American Political Economy: Response to a Critic

When there are important material interests at work, they necessarily enter into an historical explanation.

16May2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 7 comments | Continued

Civil War and the American Political Economy

The task before us is to assess in largely material terms the political-economic system arising during and after the American Civil War. Ideological issues existed, certainly, but much evidence suggests that pure idealism had a rather limited run. Antislavery was one of many themes generally serving as the stalking horse for more practical causes. Slavery [...]

23Mar2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 4 comments | Continued

Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution

This book is a well-executed account of the Constitutional Convention, clearly the fruit of many years of scholarly work. It will doubtlessly and quite deservedly come to be seen as one of the best nationalist accounts of the origins of the Constitution. (And since nationalist accounts hold American historical writing under military occupation, the book’s [...]

22Dec2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 2 comments | Continued

Some Constructive Heresies of Wilhelm Röpke

Wilhelm Röpke was a pro-market liberal who helped found the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 along with F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Leonard Read. But he has some significant differences with Anglo-American classical liberals that are worth exploring. Born in Schwarmstedt in northern Germany in 1899, Röpke came from a family of Lutheran [...]

22Dec2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 2 comments | Continued

The Fourth Amendment and Faulty Originalism

“All arrests are at the peril of the party making them.” —Alexander H. Stephens, August 27, 1863 These days the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution means next to nothing. Consider, for example, the choice offered a few years ago: surveillance under routine, easy “warrants” from the drive-through FISA Court or warrantless surveillance at the whim [...]

25Aug2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 3 comments | Continued

Anti-Populists Made America Great?

New York Times neoconservative columnist David Brooks dislikes populism (“The Populist Addiction,” January 25). “Trust your betters and criticize not their deeds,” he says in effect. After all, when you become a billionaire, you’ll expect others to treat you thus. That any one of us might strike it rich stems, apparently, from the wonderfully open, [...]

20Apr2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 1 comment | Continued

Did Locke Really Justify Limited Government?

John Locke (1632–1704) was a physician, statesman, and political philosopher, filling that last office in a dry, “empirical,” and militantly antipoetic English mode. Locke’s stock has risen and fallen over the years. Contemporaries called him a Socinian (a precursor of Unitarianism), a deist, a Muslim, and an opportunist. Later critics have seen Locke as the [...]

24Feb2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 15 comments | Continued

The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush

Steven G. Calabresi and Christopher S. Yoo count as founding fathers of the much-debated unitary executive theory (UET), which they named in 1992. In this large book they argue that every American president has subscribed to the theory, and that along with constitutional text and structure, this continuous presidential practice makes the law. Briefly, UET [...]

18Nov2009 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 0 comments | Continued

Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin

Antifederalists get no respect. Historian Cecilia Kenyon called them “men of little faith.” Other historians (even Charles Beard) pegged them as rural debtors. In this brief but engaged life of Luther Martin, though, Bill Kauffman enters a plea for “the people who lost”—an un-American enterprise he shares with William Appleman Williams. Martin, likely the most [...]

15Oct2009 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 2 comments | Continued

The American Land Question

Widespread landownership long supported a kind of liberal-republican independence. Perhaps we should reexamine the nexus and ask ourselves how, in Donald Davidson’s words, we “let the freehold pass,” and whether that was really for the best.

10Jun2009 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 6 comments | Continued

Albert Jay Nock and Alternative History

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) was a leading ideologist of the Old Right, a loose collection of individualist intellectuals, journalists, and a few politicians who opposed the growth of government in the first half of the twentieth century. Nock’s writing appeared in the Nation, the original Freeman (1920–1924), which he founded with Francis Neilson, the American [...]

1Nov2008 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 2 comments | Continued

The Political Economy of John Taylor of Caroline

As noted in the May Freeman, American revolutionaries mixed classical-republican and liberal political languages somewhat indiscriminately. Republicanism posited a relation between power and property in which independent proprietors were the bulwark of liberty. English critics of post-1688 Whig mercantilism deployed republican ideas, leading many historians to paint them as “agrarians” resisting capitalism, modernization, and social [...]

1Jun2008 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 0 comments | Continued

The Constitutional Republicanism of John Taylor of Caroline

“Great power often corrupts virtue; it invariably renders vice more malignant . . . . In proportion as the powers of government increase, both its own character and that of the people becomes worse.” —John Taylor of Caroline, 1814 John Taylor of Caroline has a secure place in the history of American political thought. Charles [...]

1May2008 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 0 comments | Continued

Slick Construction Under the Articles of Confederation

Writing lately on the Fourth Amendment, Professor Thomas Y. Davies decries the “originalism” practiced by certain Supreme Court justices and sundry legal commentators. On historical-hermeneutic grounds, he faults face-value originalism for missing “the shared, implicit assumptions that informed the public meaning” on which a given constitutional provision rested. Underlying the Fourth Amendment were common-law rules [...]

1Apr2008 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 1 comment | Continued

The Sovereign Presidency: Is This What the Framers Had in Mind?

American government under the Constitution was supposedly meant to work as follows: Congress, staying within delegated powers and the Bill of Rights, passes laws; the president executes the laws; and the courts sort out ensuing wrangles. This plan ran aground rather early—the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, for example—which raises at least two possibilities: 1) [...]

1Jan2007 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 9 comments | Continued
Older Entries

    • © Copyright 2011 Freeman - Ideas on Liberty. All rights reserved.

    43 queries. 2.207 seconds