1891 THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH 1st American edition
By James Bryce w/ Pullout Map
What did the American Constitution and the Federalist Papers Plan?
How did it turn out?
The American Commonwealth (In Two Volumes)
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In Democracy in America (1835) the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville interpreted American society through the lens of democratic political theory.
A half-century later the Scotsman James Bryce examined the institutions and the people of America as they are.
Bryce presented his findings in The American Commonwealth, first published in London in three volumes in 1888.
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James Bryces The American Commonwealth is a classic work, not only of American politics but of political science.
Eschewing the theoretical depths of democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville had plumbed, and lacking the partisan purposes for which Alexander Hamilton and his colleagues had penned The Federalist, Bryce sought to capture the America of his time, to present within reasonable compass, a full and clear view of the facts of today.
As Bryces biographer would later put it, The American Commonwealth was a photograph taken and exhibited by a political philosopher, not a history, not a picture of what was, not an account of how it had come to be.
But, as with photographs that aspire to art, the more one studies Bryces snapshot of a long-vanished America, the more one sees.
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James Bryce 1838-1922 was an Irish-born historian, professor of law, member of Parliament for the Liberal Party, and later Britains ambassador to the United States 1907-1913.
His great work, The American Commonwealth was the first in which the institutions of the United States had been thoroughly discussed from the point of view of a historian and a constitutional lawyer, and it at once became a classic.
Remains the most authoritative study of American political and social institutions.