Founding Visions: The Ideas, Individuals, and Intersections That Created America by Lance Banning (review)

Founding Visions: The Ideas, Individuals, and Intersections That Created America is an anthology of thirteen fine essays by prizewinning historian of the American Revolution Lance Banning. In the years before Banning’s death in 2006, he had considered bringing together his pieces from a variety of publications into one volume. Todd Estes, one of Banning’s many Ph.D. students at the University of Kentucky, eventually completed the project. Estes has organized the essays that Banning had considered into five thematic parts. Estes has also provided useful introductions to each part that set the stage and offer guidance concerning the historians mentioned and the historiographical context. Gordon S. Wood’s foreword serves as an encomium to a scholar whom Wood sometimes disagreed with but always respected.

All published previously from 1983 to 1995—five of them in journals, the other eight in edited collections—the well-turned pieces chosen for this volume trace Banning’s interventions in the prevailing historiography concerning ideology during and after the American Revolution. As Estes explains in his cogent introduction to the volume, Banning’s main historiographical contributions came in three general thrusts. The first was to take issue with previous interpretations of late-eighteenth-century Jeffersonian thought, arguing that Jeffersonians were far more genuinely invested in republican ideology than historians had given them credit for. The second was to referee the surprisingly bitter debates among scholars in the 1970s and early 1980s concerning whether Americans continued to look at the world through republican lenses in the early national period, as many had before the Revolution, or whether they adopted a more liberal outlook; Banning judiciously suggested that both strands were discernible even within the thoughts of individuals. Finally, Banning untangled the previously knotty problem of James Madison’s apparent about-face from a nationalist stance in the 1780s to one defending states’ rights in the 1790s and beyond. Banning explained that Madison’s thought indicated consistency on a variety of issues that transcended what might have appeared to be a major transition in Madison’s views. In each of these areas, while no one can claim to have the last word, Banning’s contentions are the ones often taken as the most authoritative.

If we were to think of this book as having a thesis, as expressed by Estes and corroborated by Wood’s foreword, it would be not so much about American Revolutionary ideology itself as a tribute to Banning’s judicious work. Banning’s signal trait as a historian was his careful and generous parsing of lines of reasoning, whether by fellow historians or by the eighteenth-century men (and it was men, in Banning’s case) whom they studied. That admirable quality shines through in all the pieces included here. This is not to say that he was uncritical of others’ assertions, but rather that Banning took time to take them seriously, to understand them, and to characterize them in the spirit that they were intended—thus his high standing among scholars who took either side of the liberalism/republicanism feud. That said, Banning’s deep investment in those debates as manifested in Founding Visions may seem somewhat dated to contemporary scholars. Not only has the field moved on to different questions, but also most historians accept that other ideologies were at work in the 1780s and 1790s, stemming from other sources such as evangelical Christianity, the Atlantic moral economy, and the French Revolution.

One nagging question about Founding Visions is that of audience. Because of its reference to “founders” in the title and because of its author’s reputation, Founding Visions will no doubt be purchased by many academic libraries and perhaps some particularly avid lay readers. But otherwise, this book’s potential reach is quite limited. The essays included here that were written with the...