The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914

“Nancy Cohen demonstrates that a highly educated and close-knit community of eminent writers elaborated laissez-faire liberalism during Reconstruction in a quest to restrain the power of propertyless majorities and that their assumptions and anxieties were not discarded by the subsequent generation of liberal reformers, but rather provided intellectual boundaries to Progressive responses to the consolidation of corporate enterprise and the distempers of urban life. Although much has been written about political liberalism, this perceptive, original, and persuasive reinterpretation stands out as one that every future student of the half-century following the Civil War must take into account.” — David Montgomery, author of The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925

“An engaging introduction to the political ideas that have helped define the modern U.S.” — CHOICE

“A complex and beautifully argued book.” — Australasian Journal of American Studies

“The history of liberalism never was that simple, of course, a point that many historians have addressed and circled without necessarily landing squarely upon it. Nancy Cohen has dared to try, and the result is enthralling. . . . Cohen does a lot of subjects justice, covering a lot of ground in limited space and leaving the reader hankering for more. . . . [Cohen] has done a prodigious amount of research and produced a vital and readable work for students and scholars of political, constitutional, and intellectual history in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries.” — Law and History Review

“This ambitious study adds a new dimension to a revision in the historical analysis of American progressivism that began with the discovery of corporate liberalism. . . . The challenge [this book] offers to earlier narratives of new liberalism bears serious consideration by all those interested in the distinctive character of U.S. liberalism.” — Journal of American History

“Our understanding of the intellectual origins of Progressivism, and therefore of the paths taken by American liberalism in the twentieth century, will be greatly deepened by the powerful case Nancy Cohen has made regarding the character and importance of their nineteenth-century antecedents. Her work serves to confirm and extend historians' growing awareness of just how rich in ideas, and how crucial to the nation’s future, were those oft-neglected three decades after the Civil War.” — Wilfred M. McClay, author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America