A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society

Block offers a new perspective on the formation of the modern American self and society. He roots self and society in the concept of agency, rather than liberty, and dispenses with the national myth of the “sacred cause of liberty”—with the Declaration of Independence as its “American scripture.”

Table of Contents:
Contents Preface 1. The American Narrative in Crisis I. The English Origins of the American Self and Society 2. The Early Puritan Insurgents and the Origins of Agency 3. The Protestant Revolutionaries and the Emerging Society of Agents 4. Thomas Hobbes and the Founding of the Liberal Politics of Agency 5. John Locke and the Mythic Society of Free Agents II. The Ascendancy of Agency and the First New Nation 6. The Great Awakening and the Emergent Culture of Agency 7. The Revolutionary Triumph of Agency III. The Dilemma of Nationhood 8. The Liberal Idyll amidst Republican Realities 9. From Liberation to Reversal in a World without Bounds IV. The Creation of an Agency Civilization 10. National Revival as the Crucible of Agency Character 11. From Sectarian Discord to Civil Religion 12. The Protestant Agent in Liberal Economics 13. John Dewey and the Modern Synthesis Conclusion: The Recovery of Agency Notes Index

About the Author :
James E. Block is Associate Professor of Political Science at DePaul University.

Review :
A Nation of Agents is a work of extravagant erudition and originality. James E. Block has read voraciously in the sources, seen things that few have seen before, and put them together as none have done before. He sets forth a new view of American culture, threading his thesis through three centuries of American thought and the preceding century of English thinking besides. -- Michael Zuckerman Journal of American History 20031201 What a wonder then is James Block's book, a daring master narrative and bracing theoretical exercise of the first order. It promises and delivers nothing less than a fundamental recasting of 'the American path to a modern self and society.' -- Robert Westbrook Christian Century 20030208 James Block's big, ambitious A Nation of Agents leaves no doubt about its aspirations in the contest to solve the Gordian knot of the relationship between the one and the many in American social thought...The subtlety and acuity with which Block develops these themes through scores of thinkers and over 500 pages can scarcely be exaggerated. A Nation of Agents is a genuinely prodigious work of scholarship. -- Daniel T. Rodgers Modern Intellectual History