James T Kloppenberg

Biographic Data

ID524150
NAMEJames T Kloppenberg
GIVEN NAMESJames T
FAMILY NAMEKloppenberg
SIGNATUREKLOPPENBERG J T
AFFILIATIONSBrandeis University
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS43
TOTAL CITATIONS151
AUTHOR COUNT43
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1987
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX4

  • Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions

    James T KloppenbergARTICLEThe Journal of Modern History2025

  • The Common Good Tradition from Madison to Rawls

    James T KloppenbergARTICLEThe Good Society2022Cited by: 1

    Americans interested in community today often lament precisely what conservative Americans prize: the perceived emphasis on individual rights and absence of explicit endorsements of civic duty, collective authority, and social equality in our eighteenth-century founding documents. Many who are familiar with the influence John Rawls had on contemporary political theory likewise fault him for prioritizing liberty over equality, a preference widely …

  • John Rawls and “Our Tradition” of Democracy

    James T KloppenbergARTICLEThe Tocqueville Review/La revue…2022

    The notion of a clear distinction between Rawls’s liberalism and social democracy rests on a caricatured conception of the liberal tradition and Rawls’s place in it. From Rousseau, John Adams, and Madison through Tocqueville to Dewey, notable political theorists have sought to balance the two principles at the core of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. In this essay I sketch the ways in which American thinkers and activists escaped the cages in which c…

  • Helena Rosenblatt. The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century

    Open AccessJames T KloppenbergARTICLEThe American Historical Review2022

  • At the Center: American Thought and Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

    Open AccessJames T KloppenbergARTICLEJournal of American History2021Cited by: 1

    A mountain of scholarship on mid-twentieth-century American culture has accumulated in recent decades, leaving nonspecialists and students to wonder how they can ever ascend its steep, rocky slopes. Synthetic overviews, offering more detailed and sophisticated analysis than surveys and a wider view than monographs, are indispensable resources. The publication of At the Center, an especially fine example of this underappreciated genre, is reason t…

  • Introduction: The New England Town Meeting: A Founding Myth of American Democracy

    Open AccessPaula Cossart, Andrea Felicetti et al.ARTICLEJournal of Deliberative Democracy2019

    Notwithstanding notable exceptions, historical investigation is far from central in deliberative scholarship and even recent work on participatory research stresses the need for more historical work. The aim of our introduction to this collective volume is to assess and to draw attention to the contribution of historical analysis in the current scholarly debate on democracy, in particular regarding the ways in which participation and deliberation…

  • Collective Interview on the History of Town Meetings

    Open AccessFrank Bryan, Frank M Bryan et al.ARTICLEJournal of Deliberative Democracy2019

    As illustrated in the introduction, the special issue ends with a ‘collective interview’ to some distinguished scholars that have given an important contribution to the study of New England Town Meetings. The collective interview has been realized by submitting three questions to our interviewees, who responded individually in written. The text of the answers has not been edited, if not minimally. However, the editors have broken up longer indivi…

  • Interchange: Corruption Has a History

    Open AccessPaula Baker, Mary F Berry et al.ARTICLEJournal of American History2019Cited by: 2

  • Democracy in history: Deliberation, pluralism, and reciprocity: a reply to Hugo Drochon

    James T KloppenbergARTICLEGlobal Intellectual History2018

    I would like to thank Hugo Drochon for his generous response to my book Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought. Likening my book to the work of a copywriter f

  • In Search of Archimedes: A Meditation on Historical Judgment

    James T KloppenbergARTICLEPolitics Religion & Ideology2018

  • The Receding Horizon of Democracy

    Open AccessJames T KloppenbergARTICLEModern Intellectual History2017References: 2

    When I began work on Toward Democracy more than twenty years ago, I planned to write a short book explaining how and why ideas about self-government developed in European and American thought from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Teaching courses and writing articles on republican, liberal, and democratic ideas, I found thinkers reflecting again and again on searing experiences of fratricidal violence, and as a result the them…

  • American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804

    James T KloppenbergARTICLEJournal of American History2017Cited by: 3

    Readers eager to understand the origins of our contemporary hate-filled politics should read Alan Taylor's latest book. Although e pluribus unum is a nice slogan, Taylor shows that the eighteenth-century white American men who established the United States were racist misogynists who hated each other almost as much as they hated Indians and blacks. The plural “revolutions” signals Taylor's admirable inclusion of bloody conflicts that raged far fr…

  • A Well-Tempered Liberalism: Modern Intellectual History and Political Theory

    Open AccessJames T KloppenbergARTICLEModern Intellectual History2013References: 6

    Intellectual history and the history of political thought are siblings, perhaps even twins. They have similar origins and use similar materials. They attract many of the same friends and make some of the same enemies. Yet like most siblings, they have different temperaments and ambitions. This essay explores the family resemblances and draws out the contrasts by examining two major works by one of the most prominent political theorists of the pas…

  • The Two Faces of American Freedom

    James T KloppenbergARTICLEJournal of American History2013Cited by: 2

    This provocative book will interest all American historians even though the legal scholar Aziz Rana has written a work of social criticism rather than historical scholarship. His “focus on the historical past is ultimately instrumental; it seeks to illuminate how the American experience itself holds the normative tools” we need (p. 17). Readers familiar with Rana's models, Michael Walzer and Christopher Lasch, will hear in his analysis echoes of …

  • Thinking Historically: A Manifesto of Pragmatic Hermeneutics

    Open AccessJames T KloppenbergARTICLEModern Intellectual History2012Cited by: 4References: 14

    American intellectual history in the future will be embodied, embedded, and extended. Building on a sturdy foundation of past practices, intellectual historians will consolidate the advances of the last half-century and continue to study ideas articulated in multiple registers, by multiple historical actors, for multiple purposes

  • The Canvas and the Color: Tocqueville's “Philosophical History” and Why It Matters Now

    Open AccessJames T KloppenbergARTICLEModern Intellectual History2006Cited by: 2

    In December of 1850, exhausted by his role in French politics and recuperating from tuberculosis, Alexis de Tocqueville retreated to the Amalfi coast to think, write, and recover. To his best friend Louis de Kergolay, Tocqueville wrote about completing his memoir on the 1848 revolution and his plans to undertake a comprehensive account of French history that would explain the turmoil of the past century. The appeal was powerful, he explained to K…

  • Tocqueville,Mill,and the American Gentry

    James T KloppenbergARTICLEThe Tocqueville Review/La revue…2006

    Tocqueville Democracy in America continues to enjoy a position of rominence in American culture. But in much of the historical scholarship written on early America, the larger topic of democracy has been displaced. In this essay I discuss the reasons for both of those phenomena, for the continuing fascination with Tocqueville in the culture at large, and for the less central position his argument concerning American democracy enjoys among histori…

  • Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood

    James T Kloppenberg, Peter S OnufARTICLEThe William and Mary Quarterly2001

  • The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828

    James T Kloppenberg, Saul CornellARTICLEJournal of the Early Republic2000Cited by: 1

  • The Virtues of Liberalism

    Joyce Appleby, James T KloppenbergARTICLEJournal of American History1999

    Journal Article The Virtues of Liberalism. By James T. Kloppenberg. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xiv, 240 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-512140-6.) Get access Joyce Appleby Joyce Appleby University of California, Los Angeles, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 3, December 1999, Pages 1323–1324, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568630 Published: 01 December …

  • The virtues of liberalism

    James T KloppenbergBOOKThe virtues of liberalism1998

    This spirited analysis - and defense - of American liberalism demonstrates the complex and rich traditions of political, economic, and social discourse that have informed American democratic culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The Virtues of Liberalism provides a convincing response to critics both right and left. In contrast to prevailing tendencies to simplify and distort American liberalism. Kloppenberg shows how the multiface…

  • Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science

    James T Kloppenberg, James GilbertARTICLEJournal of American History1998

    Journal Article Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science. By James Gilbert. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. x, 407 pp. $22.95, ISBN 0-226-29320-3.) Get access James T. Kloppenberg James T. Kloppenberg Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 85, Issue 3, December 1998, Pages 1036–1039, https://doi.org/10.23…

  • Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse

    James T Kloppenberg, R F BerkhoferARTICLEThe William and Mary Quarterly1998

  • A Companion to American Thought

    Robert M Crunde, Richard Wightman Fox et al.ARTICLEJournal of American History1997Cited by: 1

    Journal Article A Companion to American Thought. Ed. by Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995. xvi, 804 pp. $39.95, ISBN 1-55786-268-0.) Get access Robert M. Crunden Robert M. Crunden University of Texas, Austin, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 4, March 1997, Pages 1364–1365, https://doi.org/10.2307/2952911 Published: …

  • Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking

    James T KloppenbergARTICLEJournal of American History1996Cited by: 24

    Journal Article Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking? Get access James T. Kloppenberg James T. Kloppenberg associate professor of history Brandeis University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 1, June 1996, Pages 100–138, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945476 Published: 01 June 1996