Between Revival And Beyond: Republican Revisionism And The Cantested Canons In American Intellectual History

After World World II, with the help of Anglo-American ideological historians, concerning the ideological discourses and political rhetoric of American founding, they proposed a completely republican discourses and ideologies which greatly challenged Lockean political philosophy and Hartzian canon, and obtained its dominance in interpreting American ideological discourses. However, since the late 1980s, American scholarship criticized and reflected this historical tide, and its hegemony over American revolutionary vocabularies has been displaced by diversified canons. Then, by combining liberalism and republicanism,"liberal republicanism"took its priority over republican revisionism on American revolutionary thoughts. Concerning the discourses of American founding, republicanism, Lockean/Hartzian canon, Beardian canon and"liberal republicanism"competed a lot, however, by examining the revival and evolvement of republican revisionism, we find that neither the revival nor the beyond of republican revisionism, which based on misunderstanding and misreading American history. For these historians, what they explored was not the'real'past of American history, rather than construct an"imagined community"between"space of experience"and"horizon of expectation", and they intentionally invented American history.On Republican Revisionism, political philosophers, moral philosophers and intellectual historians studied a lot about it. Due to their ingoring of ideological transformation in American historiographical tides, or their reception of it based on the discussion of American scholarship in the 1980s, or having not studied from the concrete historical context, or their attention on the political thoughts rather rethink the ideological origins of its rise and evolvement, which made their understanding and mastering partially, or what they saw just the trees rather than the forest. In avoiding of the risk of de-contextualization, I will analyze its rise and fall from the perspective of the evolvement of historical"canons"in American historiography, and rethink its complicated relatiohships with its polical and historical backgrounda, and explore how the Conservative-Consensus ideology influenced this historical tide.In historical approach, by absorbing perspective of"Atlantical history"from Anglo-American intellectual historians, conceptual historical approach of Germany conceptual historians and historical method of"go between text and context"from Cambridge School historians, I will discuss the republican thoughts of Sydney, Cato Letters and Harrington explained by Anglo-American political thinkers, such as Zera Fink, Carroline Robbins and so on, and how it influenced Neo-Whig historians, especially, Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood's interpretation of ideological research; In political contents, I will analyze how British republican tradition influenced revisionists'study on American revolutionary ideologies and the revolutionary discourses, such as"liberty versus slavery","virtue versus corruption","individual rights versus common good","independence versus dependence"and so on; Meanwhile, by re-excavating and reinterpretating republican thoughts from classical Greeks, Rome, Renainessance Italy and British civil wars, Pocock and Shalhope and other scholars consciously misunderstood and misread them, which caused them make the mistakes of'mythologies'stated by Quentin Skinner. As for these issues, I will use Skinner's four categories of'mythologies'to evaluate them.In ideology, republican revisionists'interpretation relied on Conservative-Consensus School, which indirectly misleaded their explanation and understanding. For republican revisionists, they imaginatively constructed their"scope of horizon"in"space of experience", then they formed an"imagined community."During my writing, I have directly sent emails and talked with professors Shalhope, Wood, Zuckermman and Onuf on some related questions. By communicating with them directly, which helped me comprehensively to understand this historical tide, and master its ideological origins and evolvements, and it also confirmed my arguments that Republican School has been an outdated School, and republican revisionists is an"imagined community"and so on.