Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: utopian ideas, federalist revolution, symbolic perception, New York, United States, Civil War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

New York Observer
“In Beyond the Revolution, intellectual historian William Goetzmann reminds us that the most brazen utopian ambition of them all had nothing to do with sex or rapture, but was rather founded in the radical provisions of ‘we the people’ and those ‘certain inalienable rights.’”

New York Times Book Review
“[Goetzmann’s] strange and valuable book…is richly populated with radicals and utopians who, with one eye on the innermost soul and the other on world history, created a tradition of open-ended experiment.”

Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University
“Beyond the Revolution is one of the most complete, wide-ranging, readable, and insightful accounts of American intellectuals we have ever had. It deserves to be recognized as a major classic history of American intellectuals to be read by every thinking American.”

Product Description

From 1776, when Citizen Tom Paine declared, “The birthday of a new world is at hand,” America was unique in world history. A nation suffused with the spirit of explorers, constantly replenished by immigrants, and informed by a continual influx of foreign ideas, it was the world’s first truly cosmopolitan civilization.

In Beyond the Revolution, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann tells the story of America’s greatest thinkers and creators, from Paine and Jefferson to Melville and William James, showing how they built upon and battled one another’s ideas in the critical years between 1776 and 1900. An unprecedented work of intellectual history by a master historian, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our national culture.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (February 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465004954
• ISBN-13: 978-0465004959
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #256,649 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most important work on 19th century U.S thought, March 7, 2009

By	Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In this brilliant study the great minds of the American 19th century are finally brought to light in a readable text that places them in the context of America. This book traces the story of America's thinkers in the post-reovlutionary era and the world they struggled with. Of particular importance were individual rights, slavery, the raod to disunion, the uniqueness of America, the American West, the Republic as ideal, women and rights for slaves, utopia, religion's role in the New World and Empire.

This beautifully written book weaves together the personalities and thoughts of the period with the fabric of history, from the Jeffersonian times to the era of Jackson, the rise of Capitalism and the Civil War. Beggining with Paine and, as the title suggests, ending with Pragmatism, this is more than a history of thought, it is also a history of America and the dreams of its people. This book shows how European influence on American thought and the roots of some of the ideas of the thinkers and shows how they imagined a New World, a New history in America that would be uniquely American.

A wonderful history and exploration of an important theme,

Seth J. Frantzman

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Alive with ideas, May 1, 2009

By	Jay C. Smith (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism
Beyond the Revolution is a valedictory from an emeritus professor who taught American studies at Yale and the University of Texas for 50 years, so as one might expect the author definitely knows his subject and has lots of interesting things to say. His coverage of American intellectual history for the period of the Revolutionary War through the Civil War is alive with rich interpretation. A final chapter touches on the next decade or two, but in very much a whirlwind fashion, not in the same depth as the preceding material.

Goetzmann addresses nearly all of the big topics and major figures in American thought in this period; just when one suspects that he may have missed something or someone very important he gets to it (with a few notable exceptions). His chief theme is that the American vision was a quest for the "climatic model of world civilization," incorporating the best ideas, life styles, and spiritual values, remaining free and open to the new. He stresses cosmopolitanism and how American intellectuals drew upon European ideas and culture. The American intellectuals were unable to foster cultural cohesion, however, as ultimately demonstrated by the Civil War.

One of the strengths of this book is how it demonstrates the influence of Scottish Common Sense in America. This philosophy opposed Berkleyan idealism with mind-and-matter dualism, stressed the scientific method and empiricism, and was sympathetic to a laissez-faire political economy. It was based on a "faculty psychology" that held that the mind is composed of innate faculties, such as reason, the moral sense, taste, and the intuitive ability to recognize beauty. Goetzmann does a convincing job of attaching many strands of American thought to this foundation, and where there are obvious exceptions, such as Transcendentalism in New England or Romanticism in the South, he explains them as a revolt against the Enlightenment and Common Sense materialism.

Goetzmann is good also at showing how certain key ideas were disseminated. The communication vessels included single individuals in positions of influence (such as John Witherspoon, president of Princeton), schoolbooks and public education (McGuffey's readers), the growing number of colleges (46 were founded in Ohio alone between 1790 and 1860), and popular literature, for example.

The intellectual historian often faces the task of sorting out what was popular at the time from what turned out to be enduring. Goetzmann is sensitive to this challenge. He reminds us, for instance, that Moby Dick was a failure in its day, only to be rediscovered in 1920, whereas Mrs. Southworth's Ishmael (1876) sold two million copies.

There is one glaring deficiency in Beyond the Revolution, however. Goetzmann does not give evangelical Protestantism its due. He barely mentions the Second Great Awakening or its key figures, such as Charles G. Finney. From reading this book one would never know that by the 1840s perhaps as many as 80 percent of Americans were church members, whereas as few as 10 percent were earlier in the aftermath of the Revolution. "What was, in 1787, a nation of nominal Christians -- its public culture shaped more by Enlightenment rationalism than by Protestant piety -- had turned, by the mid-1840s, into the most devoted evangelical Protestant nation on earth," the historian Sean Wilentz has declared. Another scholar, Mark Noll, has written about a "grand synthesis" following the American Revolution, wherein republicanism, Common Sense philosophy, and Protestant evangelism came to prevail.

There are a few other surprising lacunae. For example, one might think that no art form other than music could best illustrate American eclecticism in this period (or any other), but Goetzmann leaves it out. Nor does he offer any substance on the ideas pro or con behind the big public transportation endeavors, the canals and railroads that so characterized this period.

A more minor irritation is that there are no footnotes, only a bibliography organized by chapter. Most readers of this book are likely to be sufficiently grounded in American history that they would find fuller documentation of sources to be helpful.

A bit more careful editing could have improved the product, as well. Goetzmann's personal and largely irrelevant opinions about government interference with private property slip in more than once, for example, and they simply should have been cut out. What apparently was excised was Goetzmann's coverage of the colonial period. That is too bad, because if it was up to the standard of what remains it would have been well worth reading, perhaps in a separate volume.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intellectual history not dead yet!, February 27, 2009

By	Charles JD Kupfer "American Studies dude" (Camp Hill, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Intellectual history, plagued by overreliance on once-chic but always useless theoretical dogma, has underperformed for years. But that's over, now. With this book, William H. Goetzmann revives the ailing field, in the process providing the perfect prescription for what ails American Studies. No tedious diatribes or labored microhistories here. Instead, readers face a lush bounty, which richly renders the process by which ideas become realities in American life. Goetzmann's earlier works won the biggest literary prizes possible, but this just might be his best. When he writes about William James, or John C. Fremont, or Orestes Brownson, it is not as a hesitant scholar, but as a peer -- that is, as a major cultural force in his own right. Goetzmann's latest proves how thrilling and rewarding intellectual history can be. The only drag is waiting for the successor volume!