American Honor

Craig Bruce Smith's study of “honor, virtue, and ethics” in the era of the American Revolution is an attempt to show how those principles were democratized and nationalized circa 1776 and how they underlay the founding of the United States (p. 2). In chapters on colonial resistance and wartime ethics, he shows how they changed during the Revolution. Though seemingly intuitive, Smith's account falls upon difficulties. Omitting attention to the religious setting of the Revolution beyond a few paragraphs on famous ministers' statements, Smith belabors the idea that everyday Americans' lives were affected by their ethical beliefs beginning in the years of imperial crisis. That they had not been before is false. He next asserts that honor and virtue came for the founding generation to be more or less interchangeable, though honor had both personal and national forms, and that honor thus came into grasp for demographic groups not previously capable of obtaining it. He shows by the end of the book that this proved to be a passing phase, as in the age of Jackson an older version of honor had a recrudescence

Environmental ethics · Honor · Political science · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Virtue · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies