Occasionally, it is worth thinking about how we should live together. The year following a pivotal presidential election is such a time. In the cradle of American democracy, we will examine seminal writings throughout American history in an effort to answer that question.
The New England Puritans were the originators of Americas political culture and rhetoric. They laid the foundations of national consciousness. In a 1630 sermon, John Winthrop warned the colonists that their new community would be a City Upon a Hill divinely ordained and watched by the world. This identity wed privilege to responsibility.
More than a hundred years later, the Declaration of Independence became the nations most cherished symbol of liberty. But the Founding Fathers were not utopians, and they recognized that expansion was a matter of survival for the young republic.
By the late 18th Century, democratic values which championed money-making, hard work, and individualism had eradicated most vestiges of old world aristocracy and values in the North. It was then that French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville attempted to capture the peculiar nature of American political life. He saw both an industrious population yearning to amass vast fortunes and a political culture that promoted a relatively pronounced equality, but also, as he put it, a middling mediocrity.
In his book, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope, Columbia University professor and acclaimed social critic, Andrew Delbanco revisits Americas history and its literature and prods readers to think about how the idea of the nation relates to their deepest desires and hopes.
John Winthrops City Upon a Hill, the Declaration of Independence, excerpts from the Federalist Papers and Toquevilles Democracy in America, and Andrew Delbancos The Real American Dream: a Meditation on Hope
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