Republicanism, Liberalism, and Democracy: Political Culture in the Early Republic.

Surveys the recent literature on the major interpretations of early national thought and culture. Historians have yet to create a conceptual framework that blends the traditional and the modern that characterized this period. The years after 1760 were a time of flux, of "competing cultural forces." The Revolution intensified this flux, created a crisis of confidence, and produced a "dialectical tension between liberalism and republicanism." Americans developed a theory of politics that focused on the role of power.