Overview

The Puritan Tradition examines how a Puritan past, historically reconstructed as a founding legend, gave meaning to early American political culture. In tracing the rhetorical invocations of this Puritan legacy, this study lends important insight into how this constructed past helped shape the political thought that underlies revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig political discourse. This emphasis on the changing political uses of this puritan Past is an important departure from scholarship that identifies an enduring Puritan essence that is read forward into American culture. Where such scholarship has often yielded either unpersuasive genealogies or a view of Puritanism as dissolving into irrelevance, The Puritan Tradition demonstrates how a Puritan past continues to play a critical role in American political identity.

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9780820438214

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In 'The Puritan Tradition', Dean Hammer gives a masterful analysis of the origins and subsequent uses of Puritan rhetoric. Hammer's interpretative exposition, at once skillful, subtle, and engaging, shows why and how Puritan rhetoric influenced and was transformed in subsequent American political traditions. Hammer is equally conversant with - and weaves together deftly - critical debates in political theory, philosophy, and religion. 'The Puritan Tradition' commands the attention of anyone interested in the state of religion and political rhetoric in America, and how we arrived where we are. (Kyle Pasewark, Dept. of Religion, Concordia College) This is an ambitious and challenging study by a political scientist and theorist that will be welcomed as well by historians of culture and the thoughtful general reader. Reflecting a keen historical sense of continuity and change, it provides a richly textured analysis of the way Americans up through the mid-nineteenth century earnestly engaged in the ongoing task of self-definition. (Major Wilson, Dept. of History, The University of Memphis) 'The Puritan Tradition' is a gracefully written, ambitious, and nuanced treatment of Puritanism's place in early American political thought. Hammer's close examination of Federalist and Whig orations gives us a much richer sense of the political culture of American history's 'losers', the Federalist and Whig parties, than we have had before. (Richard Ellis, Dept. of Politics, Willamette University)

Author Information

The Author: Dean Hammer is Associate Professor of Government at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from The University of California, Berkeley, and has published numerous articles in political thought.

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