Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Einstein and Steve Jobs, shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character.
America's Constitution: A Biography
In America’s Constitution, one of this era’s most accomplished constitutional law scholars, Akhil Reed Amar, gives the first comprehensive account of one of the world’s great political texts. Incisive, entertaining, and occasionally controversial, this “biography” of America’s framing document explains not only what the Constitution says but also why the Constitution says it.
The Social Contract
A book in which Rousseau theorized about the best way to establish a political community in the face of the problems of commercial society, which he had already identified in his Discourse on Inequality (1754).
The Spirit of Laws
This treatise on political theory, originally published anonymously in 1748, has become one of the most influential works of political science ever written. French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu wrote this piece under the inspiration of such political theorists as René Descartes, Nicholas de Malebranche, and Niccolò Machiavelli. The ideas laid forth by Montesquieu in this work, especially that of balancing power among branches of government, had a prominent influence on the American Constitution, although at the time of its publication was subject to censorship. Over twenty years in the making, “The Spirit of Laws” considers a vast range of political topics including: the preservation of civil liberties, taxation, slavery, commerce, the role of women, crime and punishment, religion, education, morality and the law, and other matters of political, sociological, and anthropological importance. Undoubtedly, it has become one of the most emulated and highly-regarded treatises on political law ever written.
1789
by David Andress
The world in 1789 stood on the edge of a unique transformation. At the end of an unprecedented century of progress, the fates of three nations—France; the nascent United States; and their common enemy, Britain—lay interlocked. France, a nation bankrupted by its support for the American Revolution, wrestled to seize the prize of citizenship from the ruins of the old order. Disaster loomed for the United States, too, as it struggled, in the face of crippling debt and inter-state rivalries, to forge the constitutional amendments that would become known as the Bill of Rights. Britain, a country humiliated by its defeat in America, recoiled from tales of imperial greed and the plunder of India as a king’s madness threw the British constitution into turmoil. Radical changes were in the air.
A year of revolution was crowned in two documents drafted at almost the same time: the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights. These texts gave the world a new political language and promised to foreshadow new revolutions, even in Britain. But as the French Revolution spiraled into chaos and slavery experienced a rebirth in America, it seemed that the budding code of individual rights would forever be matched by equally powerful systems of repression and control.
David Andress reveals how these events unfolded and how the men who led them, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, and George Washington, stood at the threshold of the modern world. Andress shows how the struggles of this explosive year—from the inauguration of George Washington to the birth of the cotton trade in the American South; from the British Empire’s war in India to the street battles of the French Revolution—would dominate the Old and New Worlds for the next two centuries.