Abstract

The resurgence of American interest in political ideas, together with the search for a native American conservatism, is evident in the revived study of the political philosophy of Orestes A. Brownson, one of the most original political thinkers of that transitional era between the administrations of Jackson and Lincoln when the future Republican party was in embryo. In the past Americans contributed enormously to political practice, but only slightly and incidentally to theory. The American historian, Henry Steele Commager, has recently remarked that since Jefferson and Hamilton most American political thought has been merely repetitive. To this generalisation Brownson is the outstanding exception of the mid-nineteenth century.