Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
America's Philosopher by Claire Rydell Arcenas
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

America's Philosopher

John Locke in American Intellectual Life
by Claire Rydell Arcenas

$10.49

Narrator narrator

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 7 hours 1 minute
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.


America’s Philosopher examines how John Locke has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted over three centuries of American history.

 

The influence of polymath philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) can still be found in a dizzying range of fields, as his writings touch on issues of identity, republicanism, and the nature of knowledge itself. Claire Rydell Arcenas’s new book tells the story of Americans’ longstanding yet ever-mutable obsession with this English thinker’s ideas, a saga whose most recent manifestations have found the so-called Father of Liberalism held up as a right-wing icon.



The first book to detail Locke’s trans-Atlantic influence from the eighteenth century until today, America’s Philosopher shows how and why interpretations of his ideas have captivated Americans in ways few other philosophers—from any nation—ever have. As Arcenas makes clear, each generation has essentially remade Locke in its own image, taking inspiration and transmuting his ideas to suit the needs of the particular historical moment. Drawing from a host of vernacular sources to illuminate Locke’s often contradictory impact on American daily and intellectual life from before the Revolutionary War to the present, Arcenas delivers a pathbreaking work in the history of ideas.

HistoryPolitics & EconomyScience & TechnologyPhilosophyNonfiction

Claire Rydell Arcenas is assistant professor of history at the University of Montana.

Audiobook details

Author
Narrator narrator
ISBN 9780226831619
Length 7 hours 1 minute
Language English
Publisher University of Chicago Press
Publication date
Edition Unabridged
Genres History, Politics & Economy, Science & Technology, Philosophy & Nonfiction
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

“A wonderfully wide-ranging and insightful history of John Locke’s changing reputation in America, moving from the early eighteenth century to the present with terrific scholarly command and authority. Locke’s invention, more than a century after the fact, as the key political theorist of the American Revolution is only the most striking of its findings. This book will surprise and inform every reader invested in the history of American political culture. There is simply nothing comparable in the existing literature.”
— Daniel Rodgers, Princeton University

“If you thought you understood John Locke’s vital role in American thought, Arcenas’s fascinating book will make your jaw drop. Make no mistake, Locke has indeed been ‘America’s philosopher’ since his ideas first arrived in the early eighteenth century. But as readers will discover in her meticulously researched and absorbing study, Locke has mattered to Americans in ways wholly unexpected.”
— Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“America’s Philosopher accomplishes two tasks at once: it brings to life the fullness of John Locke’s thought and tracks the multiple ways a dynamic and changing America engaged with varying aspects of that thought. Arcenas shows how the early modern British philosopher’s place in American thought and culture shifted over three centuries, from a cherished guide to child-rearing, education, and toleration in the eighteenth century to a one-dimensional libertarian hero in our own day. Drawing on common-place books and college curricula, the work of mid-century scholars and the speeches of senators, Arcenas tells this fascinating story with clarity and verve.”
— Leslie A. Butler, Dartmouth College

"Arcenas has done valuable work in documenting Americans’ affection for an empiricist philosopher. Her discussion of twentieth-century scholarly debates over Locke’s significance, from Leo Strauss to J.G.A. Pocock, are accurate and well-expressed."
— Wall Street Journal

“As Arcenas [shows], with detailed documentation and persuasive narrative . . . Americans deformed and truncated [Locke into] the alleged father of liberalism . . . With regard to ‘Locke’s polyvalent influence,’ Arcenas argues that for two centuries after his death he was almost omnipresent in colonial libraries, college reading lists, and periodical polemics, and almost as well known for counsel on card-playing and commonplacing as for epistemology or educational prescriptions.”
— Times Literary Supplement

"Arcenas’s thesis in this book is that John Locke 'stands—and has always stood—at the center of American intellectual life' (p.1), and that, paradoxically, his true significance to America has often been mischaracterized. . . . The book is enhanced with copious notes and an extensive bibliography. . . . Recommended."
— Choice

"Remarkable. . . In America’s Philosopher, Professor Arcenas has produced an entertaining and insightful book of political historiography that enlivens America’s intellectual past and stimulates thinking about its present."
— Montana The Magazine of Western History

“Clearly argued and written. . . . Arcenas convincingly demonstrates that colonists looked to Locke for guidance on matters involving child rearing and self-development, knowledge and its foundation, ways to read the Bible, and moral education, not so much as a guide to political principles. The text that early and mid-twentieth-century historians and political theorists such as Merle Curti, Carl Becker and Louis Hartz defined as the core of Lockean philosophy, the Two Treatises of Government, was not unknown to colonists, but it took a decided backseat to the Locke who reinvented the human mind, and when colonists went looking for political principles, Locke also took a backseat to Montesquieu and many others.”
— Modern Intellectual History

"Arcenas’s work is eye-opening. She unveils the true role of Locke, a popular figure since colonial times, in shaping American society. Arcenas’s investigation takes us on a journey through archives, newspapers, syllabi, diaries, philosophy, history, theology, and so on, to illustrate the undeniable influence that Locke had on America’s identity."
— Mario I. Juarez-Garcia, The Independent Review

"Groundbreaking. . . we can and should value this book for making an impressive case for how each generation of Americans has read [Locke] with its own politically distorting lenses."
— Chronicles Magazine

“Original and surprising.”
— London Review of Books

Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting