American Individualism

Author : Herbert Hoover,George Nash
Publisher : Hoover Press
Page : 100 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2016-12-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780817920166

Get Book

American Individualism by Herbert Hoover,George Nash Pdf

In late 1921, then secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover decided to distill from his experiences a coherent understanding of the American experiment he cherished. The result was the 1922 book American Individualism. In it, Hoover expounded and vigorously defended what has come to be called American exceptionalism: the set of beliefs and values that still makes America unique. He argued that America can make steady, sure progress if we preserve our individualism, preserve and stimulate the initiative of our people, insist on and maintain the safeguards to equality of opportunity, and honor service as a part of our national character. American Individualism asserts that equal opportunity for individuals to develop their abilities is "the sole source of progress" and the fundamental impulse behind American civilization for three—now four—centuries. More than ninety years have passed since this book was first published; it is clear, in retrospect, that the volume was partly motivated by the political controversies of the time. But American Individualism is not simply a product of a dim and receding past. To a considerable degree the ideological battles of Hoover's era are the battles of our own, and the interpretations we make of our past—particularly the years between 1921 and 1933—will mold our perspective on the crises of the present.

Author : Margaret Hoover
Publisher : Crown Forum
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2012-08-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780307718167

Get Book

American Individualism by Margaret Hoover Pdf

A Fox News analyst argues for a redefinition of conservatism that will modernize outdated Republican ideas and enable a younger generation to embrace the party, defining her views about Individualism while contending that universal, conservative beliefs can be adapted to revitalize Republican political strength.

Author : Barry Alan Shain
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 415 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2021-02-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691224992

Get Book

The Myth of American Individualism by Barry Alan Shain Pdf

Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one's life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans' widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.

Author : Alex Zakaras
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2024-08-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691226323

Get Book

The Roots of American Individualism by Alex Zakaras Pdf

A panoramic history of American individualism from its nineteenth-century origins to today’s bitterly divided politics Individualism is a defining feature of American public life. Its influence is pervasive today, with liberals and conservatives alike promising to expand personal freedom and defend individual rights against unwanted intrusion, be it from big government, big corporations, or intolerant majorities. The Roots of American Individualism traces the origins of individualist ideas to the turbulent political controversies of the Jacksonian era (1820–1850) and explores their enduring influence on American politics and culture. Alex Zakaras plunges readers into the spirited and rancorous political debates of Andrew Jackson’s America, drawing on the stump speeches, newspaper editorials, magazine articles, and sermons that captivated mass audiences and shaped partisan identities. He shows how these debates popularized three powerful myths that celebrated the young nation as an exceptional land of liberty: the myth of the independent proprietor, the myth of the rights-bearer, and the myth of the self-made man. The Roots of American Individualism reveals how generations of politicians, pundits, and provocateurs have invoked these myths for competing political purposes. Time and again, the myths were used to determine who would enjoy equal rights and freedoms and who would not. They also conjured up heavily idealized, apolitical visions of social harmony and boundless opportunity, typically centered on the free market, that have distorted American political thought to this day.

Author : Jack Turner
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2012-09-20
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780226817149

Get Book

Awakening to Race by Jack Turner Pdf

The election of America’s first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them. Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when individualism is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness—consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America. Turner’s “new individualism” becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.

Author : Leah N. Gordon
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2015-05-20
Category : Education
ISBN : 9780226238449

Get Book

From Power to Prejudice by Leah N. Gordon Pdf

Gordon provides an intellectual history of the concept of racial prejudice in postwar America. In particular, she asks, what accounts for the dominance of theories of racism that depicted oppression in terms of individual perpetrators and victims, more often than in terms of power relations and class conflict? Such theories came to define race relations research, civil rights activism, and social policy. Gordon s book is a study in the politics of knowledge production, as it charts debates about the race problem in a variety of institutions, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago s Committee on Education Training and Research in Race Relations, Fisk University s Race Relations Institutes, Howard University s "Journal of Negro Education," and the National Conference of Christians and Jews."

Author : Aaron Barlow
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 311 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2013-08-27
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9798216068945

Get Book

The Cult of Individualism by Aaron Barlow Pdf

American individualism: It is the reason for American success, but it also tears the nation apart. Why do Americans have so much trouble seeing eye to eye today? Is this new? Was there ever an American consensus? The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth explores the rarely discussed cultural differences leading to today's seemingly intractable political divides. After an examination of the various meanings of individualism in America, author Aaron Barlow describes the progression and evolution of the concept from the 18th century on, illuminating the wide division in Caucasian American culture that developed between the culture based on the ideals of the English Enlightenment and that of the Scots-Irish "Borderers." The "Borderer" legacy, generally explored only by students of Appalachian culture, remains as pervasive and significant in contemporary American culture and politics as it is, unfortunately, overlooked. It is from the "Borderers" that the Tea Party sprang, along with many of the attitudes of the contemporary American right, making it imperative that this culture be thoroughly explored.

Author : Lawrence M. Eppard,Mark Robert Rank,Heather E. Bullock
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2022-03-04
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1611462363

Get Book

Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality by Lawrence M. Eppard,Mark Robert Rank,Heather E. Bullock Pdf

In Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality, the authors argue that a culture of individualism in the U.S. limits the pressure politicians face to develop robust social policies. This individualism combines with racism and features of the political ...

Author : Paul M. Rego
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0739126075

Get Book

American Ideal by Paul M. Rego Pdf

This book takes Theodore Roosevelt seriously as a man of ideas, a thinker who was deeply committed to addressing the problems of his generation. It also is a study of TR as a leader, one who used rhetoric and example to convince his fellow citizens that it was possible to reconcile the American traditionof individualism with a Progressive-inspired concern for the social good.

Author : Roger Smith
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2013-01-24
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781475965292

Get Book

American Spirit by Roger Smith Pdf

The first European immigrants came to the American colonies to escape incessant wars, oppressive governments, lack of opportunity, and tyrannical religious authorities. The dangerous and mysterious new world couldn’t rectify all the ills of the old world, but it offered something that resonated with their Christian faith—hope for a better life for their loved ones. They miraculously built a government that preserved more freedom and opportunity for the American people than any government in history. The United States can continue as a beacon of hope if its citizens focus on the common goodness of their past that binds them instead of the differences that divide them. American Spirit presents this refreshing perspective through an exciting mosaic of adventure, despair, hope, faith, and love. Smith’s incredible research and vivid writing style as he follows multiple generations of immigrants seeking freedom in America make this book an essential read. Smith’s novel is historical fiction that intrigues, engages, and lingers, long after the last page is turned. — Joe Kilgore, US Review of Books The Civil War is an ugly period of American history. Uglier still, are the many times inaccurate accounts of the war were told. Roger Smith has taken a giant step forward in setting the record straight. Reading this book will open your mind. It is much more than just another war story. — Dan Mackintosh, Pacific Book Review

Author : Gillian Brown
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 1992-09-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0520913353

Get Book

Domestic Individualism by Gillian Brown Pdf

Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender, class, and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity, Brown brilliantly alters, for literary critics, feminists, and cultural historians, the critical perspective from which nineteenth-century American literature and culture have been viewed. In this study of the domestic constitution of individualism, Brown traces how the values of interiority, order, privacy, and enclosure associated with the American home come to define selfhood in general. By analyzing writings by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fern, and Gilman, and by examining other contemporary cultural modes—abolitionism, consumerism, architecture, interior decorating, motherhood, mesmerism, hysteria, and agoraphobia—she reconfigures the parameters of both domesticity and the patterns of self it fashions. Unfolding a representational history of the domestic, Brown's work offers striking new readings of the literary texts as well as of the cultural contexts that they embody.

Author : David Davenport,Gordon Lloyd
Publisher : Hoover Press
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2017-01-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780817920265

Get Book

Rugged Individualism by David Davenport,Gordon Lloyd Pdf

Today, American "rugged individualism" is in a fight for its life on two battlegrounds: in the policy realm and in the intellectual world of ideas that may lead to new policies. In this book, the authors look at the political context in which rugged individualism flourishes or declines and offer a balanced assessment of its future prospects. They outline its path from its founding—marked by the Declaration of Independence—to today, focusing on different periods in our history when rugged individualism was thriving or was under attack. The authors ultimately look with some optimism toward new frontiers of the twenty-first century that may nourish rugged individualism. They assert that we cannot tip the delicate balance between equality and liberty so heavily in favor of equality that there is no liberty left for individual Americans to enjoy.

Author : Herbert Hoover
Publisher : Cosimo, Inc.
Page : 81 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2005-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781596053465

Get Book

American Individualism by Herbert Hoover Pdf

[T]he basic foundations of autocracy, whether it be class government or capitalism in the sense that a few men through unrestrained control of property determine the welfare of great numbers, is as far apart from the rightful expression of American individualism as the two poles. -from American Individualism Before he became president of the United States, Herbert Hoover organized massive programs to feed the starving after World War I. This compact treatise is the result of his experience in Europe, a defense of a moderate American liberalism that springs from the kindness, intelligence, and generosity of the people... and a call for the world to follow this example. Hoover would find this optimistic and munificent philosophy, published in 1922, sorely challenged only a few years later, when his new presidency was faced with the stock-market crash of 1929 and the resulting economic depression. With its peek inside the thinking that would eventually bring down Hoover's presidency, this is a remarkable little book, a reminder that the best of intentions aren't always enough. The 31st President of the United States, HERBERT HOOVER (1874-1964) was born in Iowa, educated at Stanford University, and made a fortune in mining interests. He was instrumental in numerous international war-relief efforts. He served as secretary of commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, and was elected to the Oval Office in 1928.

Author : Hoover, Herbert
Publisher : Best Books on
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 1922-01-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9781623768744

Get Book

American individualism ; The challenge to liberty by Hoover, Herbert Pdf

Author : Herbert J. Gans
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Science
ISBN : 0195072170

Get Book

Middle American Individualism by Herbert J. Gans Pdf

Written by one America's most eminent sociologists, this book examines the lives and ideals of today's "middle Americans"--whom the more affluent and elite have long put down as an uncultured and unthinking mass--and finds in them the individualistic creed upon which democracy thrives. Neither narcissistic, like that of the "Me Generation" yuppie, nor materialistic, like that of the capitalist, their individualism is the simple desire for personal control over one's social and, especially, economic environment. It is an individualism based on self-reliance, much like that which Alexis de Tocqueville identified as the fundamental American trait over 150 years ago. Far from being right-wing racists, greedy materialists, or uncultured "Joe Sixpacks," Herbert J. Gans describes this diverse group of Americans as the blue, pink, white, and new-collar workers who come in all colors and live modestly in suburbs, small towns, or big city ethnic neighborhoods. Numerically and culturally they make up the majority of Americans, and it is their particular vision of the American Dream to which every presidential candidate appeals. Yet, while they have often been viewed as a mass susceptible to political manipulation, the traditional distrust middle Americans feel toward big government, big business, and other bureaucratic organizations has led them to avoid politics as much as possible. As a result American society, argues Gans, is turning into an "upscale democracy," with voting and other forms of political participation becoming increasingly the province of the rich and well-organized. Current economic and political trends toward greater centralization are enlarging the gulf between middle Americans and those institutions upon which they must depend for their well-being; in Middle American Individualism Gans shows that this growing alienation is the greatest threat to democracy today. How can America reclaim this disaffected and ever more silent majority? Rejecting the usual appeals for less political apathy and more community action, Gans advocates a series of proposals that would bring political institutions to the people rather than forcing them to seek political, economic, and social guidance within the unfamiliar and intimidating surroundings they are forced to deal with now. Calling for a new understanding between liberals and middle Americans, Gans seeks nothing less than a transformation of our present system into a truly representative democracy. Middle American Individualism is the first step in that direction.