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Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency

Name: Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency
Author: Ben Lowe
ISBN: 9780813079271

Edited by Ben Lowe

Published by: University Press of Florida

Series: The Alan B. and Charna Larkin Series on the American Presidency

This volume examines the political ideas behind the construction of the presidency in the United States Constitution, as well as how these ideas were implemented by the nation’s early presidents.

342 Pages6.00 × 9.00

Paperback
9780813079271
Published: September 17, 2024

$28.00

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Hardcover
9780813066813
Published: June 8, 2021

$90.00

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EPUB
9780813073569
Published: September 17, 2024

(Ebook delivery via Leaf eReader app.)

$28.00

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PDF
9780813057750
Published: June 8, 2021

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$180.00

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Description
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Praise
Table of Contents

How the American executive office was constructed in the Constitution and implemented by the first presidents

This volume examines the political ideas behind the construction of the presidency in the U.S. Constitution, as well as how these ideas were implemented by the nation’s early presidents. The framers of the Constitution disagreed about the scope of the new executive role they were creating, and this volume reveals the ways the duties and power of the office developed contrary to many expectations.

Here, leading scholars of the early republic examine principles from European thought and culture that were key to establishing the conceptual language and institutional parameters for the American executive office. Unpacking the debates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, these essays describe how the Constitution left room for the first presidents to set patterns of behavior and establish a range of duties to make the office functional within a governmental system of checks and balances. Contributors explore how these presidents understood their positions and fleshed out their full responsibilities according to the everyday operations required to succeed.

As disputes continue to surround the limits of executive power today, this volume helps identify and explain the circumstances in which limits can be imposed on presidents who seem to dangerously exceed the constitutional parameters of their office. Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency demonstrates that this distinctive, time-tested role developed from a fraught, historically contingent, and contested process.

Ben Lowe, professor of history at Florida Atlantic University, is the author of Commonwealth and the English Reformation: Protestantism and the Politics of Religious Change in the Gloucester Vale, 1483–1560.

“These essays offer a set of revealing insights into the origins of the American presidency, the most novel and unprecedented office that the framers of the Constitution created.”—Jack Rakove, author of Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America
“Provides an important and timely contribution to the conception, implementation, and early development of the executive office of the United States, deftly merging legal and constitutional scholarship with historical analysis.”—Tyson Reeder, author of Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution

“These essays complement each other well and offer much insight into the origins of, earliest debates about, and development of the US executive office.”—Choice
“An attractive collection of scholarly essays.”—Journal of the American Revolution

List of Figures

Foreword
David Armitage

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Political Thought and the Intellectual Origins of the American Presidency: Royalism, Executive Power and the History of Ideas
Ben Lowe

Part I. The European Origins of the American Presidency

Chapter 2. Checks and Balances: The Cromwellian Origins of the Presidency
Blair Worden

Chapter 3. Party and Faction in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought from Montesquieu to Madison
Max Skjönsberg

Chapter 4. Does the United States Need a Bill of Rights?: Monarchs, Presidents, and the Persistence of a Political Genre in the Age of the American Revolution
Eric Slauter

Chapter 5. Enlightened Despotism and the American Revolution: The Political Thought of Frederick the Great of Prussia
Caroline Winterer

Part II. The Politics of Constitution Making: The Executive and the Federal Union

Chapter 6. National Power and the Presidency: Rival Forms of Federalist Constitutionalism at the Founding
Jonathan Gienapp

Chapter 7. Defending an Energetic Executive: Theory and Practice in The Federalist
Claire Rydell Arcenas

Chapter 8. Is the Electoral College the Fundamental Problem?: New State Admissions and the U.S. Constitution
François Furstenberg

Part III. Implementing an Ideal: Political Theory and Practice among the Early Presidents

Chapter 9. The Political Practices of the First Presidents: The Cabinet and the Executive Branch
Lindsay M. Chervinsky

Chapter 10. Mirror for Presidents: George Washington and the Law of Nations
Daniel J. Hulsebosch

Chapter 11. Liberty and Power: The Classical Republicanism of George Washington and Mercy Otis Warren
Rosemarie Zagarri

List of Contributors

Index

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Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency

Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency

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