Liberty and Order - by Lance Banning (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Liberty and Order is an ambitious anthology of primary source writings: letters, circulars, debate transcriptions, House proceedings, and newspaper articles that document the years during which America's Founding generation divided over the sort of country the United States was to become.

With this significant collection, the reader receives a deeper understanding of the complex issues, struggles, and personalities that made up the first great party battle and that continue to shape our representative government today.

Lance Banning (1942-2006) was Professor of History at the University of Kentucky.

Review Quotes

Compiled and edited by Lance Banning (Professor of History, University of Kentucky), Liberty and Order: The First American Party Struggle presents representatives of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist factions expounding in their own words their divergent philosophies, visions, and concerns-differences that would give birth to a system of American political parties which was originally unexpected and unforeseen by the Founding Fathers and the United States Constitution. Liberty and Order provides significant insights and backgrounding into such historical issues as the development of the Bill of Rights; the impact of the French Revolution and the War of 1812 upon American civil liberties and foreign policy; and the primal foundations of what we recognize today as the American political economy. Liberty and Order is a seminal contribution to school and community library American Political History collections.

James A. Cox
The Midwest Book Review
2004

Liberty and Order does a fine job of charting the course of American political history from the constitutional debates of 1787-8 to the end of the first party system in 1816. It contains a rich assortment of public and private documents. The private documents, mostly letters, are particularly fascinating, revealing the full depth of partisan feeling. They prove conclusively that conspiracy theories were genuinely held beliefs, not mere rhetorical tools to use on gullible voters. The prevalence of such theories even among the supremely rational founders can be instructive to our own age, which is hardly immune from them. Liberty and Order is an invaluable tool in understanding the origins of the American political system.

Carl J. Richard
Department of History and Geography
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
International Journal of the Classical Tradition
Winter 2005