Courts of Common Reason

In Courts of Common Reason, Howard DeLong captures the revolutionary thought and passion of our founding generation by citing an abundance of primary sources. Much of this historical material is found in no other book on the American Revolution. This evidence enables DeLong to articulate a new understanding of what the American Revolution was in the eighteenth century, and to present a new vision of what it can become in the twenty-first. Rich in original political and economic ideas, the book includes: 1. A proposal, based on Thomas Jefferson's idea, for institutions of distributed intelligence called courts of common reason. By incorporating contemporary mathematics, science, technology, and the social sciences into the design of these courts, they could accurately reveal what James Madison called the cool and deliberate sense of the community. 2. A plan for the people, speaking through courts of common reason, to unite the economic and political realms into a new symbiotic relationship, a relationship that could become the secure foundation for America's political economy in the twenty-first century. 3. A suggestion for a Festival America, based on the Athenian model, that would integrate the humane effect of the arts - for example, poetry, drama, and music - into the structure of our political life. 4. An inquiry into the fundamental role of aesthetic ideals in the American Revolution. Today perfectionist aspirations, comparable to those expressed by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and other eighteenth-century figures, are almost completely unknown, even though, DeLong argues, they are indispensible for guiding and sustaining deep political reforms. In summary, Courts of Common Reason is the most thorough philosophical analysis of the American Revolution in print.