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theses

“With a Publick Spirit”: Community and Commitment in New England, 1630-1689 engages in a critical analysis of the core principles of New England’s civic identity from its founding through roughly the first two and a half generations of political development. It explores the complex relationship between the problem of sustaining revolutionary founding commitments and the concept of civic education as character formation in seventeenth century New England. The subject presents the opportunity to study the critical intersection of theory and practice and argues that these early decades were crucial for the establishment of a particularly American concept of civic formation, and thus, for the development of American political thought on the nature of citizenship. At the heart of the project is a reflection on the civic virtues necessary for founding and maintaining a political society, the ways that they can be encouraged through civic institutions such as schools and legal systems, and the potential dangers when such virtues are either deficient or carried to excess by the citizenry. I argue that the April Revolution in Boston of 1689 demonstrates that the Puritans were successful in transferring their founding commitments to subsequent generations, and that this success stemmed from their utilization of an approach to civic formation that emphasized the importance of civic knowledge and virtue as prerequisite to civic engagement. The problem of Puritan New England is very much an American problem, and in the conclusion, I argue that the Puritan approach to civic formation recurs in the history of American political thought in ways that have proven particularly useful when the nation’s founding principles seemed most threatened. In contrast, I point to the inadequacies of two major strains of the thought within the American tradition that diverge from the Puritan model of civic formation to successfully perpetuate the commitments of the national founding. Finally, I suggest some of the ways in which an adaptation of the Puritan mode of civic education may be useful for shaping present-day debates about civic education.

ETD_7112

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Sarah Augusta Morgan Smith

doi:10.7282/T3X06965

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.