The four essays by Ashworth, Blackburn, Nimtz and Post all make important contributions to our understanding of the causes and consequences of the American Civil War, and to modern analysis of these questions within a Marxist tradition. Although they differ among themselves on key issues, they direct attention to problems too often neglected by other historians: the rôle of class-conflict within North and South in the coming of the War; the part played by slave-resistance in the sectional conflict; the nature (...) of the economic relationship between slave and free economies; and a shift in control of the national state as an enduring result of the conflict. (shrink)

A critical biography of the Revolutionary pamphleteer, exploring the origins, expression, and impact of his ideas and the place of his radical ideology in the eighteenth-century world.