ANTHONY M. Joseph. From Liberty to Liberality

Readers intent on identifying the cluster of values, assumptions, practices, and priorities that launched and then gave momentum to the American Revolution, and subsequently transformed communities in the early republic, discover that current scholarship offers essentially two paradigms. The first paradigm—liberalism—identifies a constellation of ideas and habits that produced a middling classless society operating under a broad consensus that acknowledged self-interest. The second—republicanism—emphasizes individual liberty and the means to secure and protect it. The expansion of democratic principles and practices during these years, as described by Gordon S. Wood and others, demonstrates the absorptive potential of republican ideals and forms. Anthony M. Joseph inflates the boundaries of republican thought further, maintaining that Pennsylvanians between 1776 and 1820 “expanded [their] range of republican values to include ‘liberality,’ and in that expanded range liberality came to hold the central place” (p. 4). To lay the groundwork for “a proper history of American liberalism,” Joseph focuses on the Pennsylvania legislature in the half-century after 1776. As the threat to personal liberty lessened with the elimination of royal government and the diminution of executive power on both state and national levels, the legislature—heretofore the bastion of the people's liberty against encroachments of power and influence—suffered from the lack of a clear agenda. Criticism of its practices, slight productivity, and cost eventually elicited doubts as to the value of legislative sessions generally. It was liberality, the widespread and fair distribution of public authority and public money to increase the public good, which eventually established the legislature's raison d'être, according to Joseph.

Democracy · Legislature · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Scholarship · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies