Frontier Democracy

Frontier Democracy examines the debates over state constitutions in the antebellum Northwest (Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin) from the 1820s through the 1850s. This is a book about conversations: in particular, the fights and negotiations over the core ideals in the constitutions that brought these frontier communities to life. Silvana R. Siddali argues that the Northwestern debates over representation and citizenship reveal two profound commitments: the first to fair deliberation, and the second to ethical principles based on republicanism, Christianity, and science. Some of these ideas succeeded brilliantly: within forty years, the region became an economic and demographic success story. However, some failed tragically: racial hatred prevailed everywhere in the region, in spite of reformers' passionate arguments for justice, and resulted in disfranchisement and even exclusion for non-white Northwesterners that lasted for generations.

The Frontiers of Democracy offers a comprehensive examination of restrictions on the vote in democracies today. For the first time, the reasons for excluding people (prisoners, children, intellectually disabled, non-citizens) from the suffrage in contemporary societies is critically examined from the point of view of democratic theory.

This collection of essays uses Alexis de Tocqueville's writings to explore the dilemmas of democratization in the twenty-first century.

The Frontiers of Democracy offers a comprehensive examination of restrictions on the vote in democracies today. For the first time, the reasons for excluding people (prisoners, children, intellectually disabled, non-citizens) from the suffrage in contemporary societies is critically examined from the point of view of democratic theory.

Alexis de Tocqueville is widely cited as an authority on civil society, religion and American political culture, yet his thoughts on democratization outside the West and the challenges of a globalizing age are less known and often misunderstood. This collection of essays by a distinguished group of international scholars explores Tocqueville's vision of democracy in Asia and the Middle East; the relationship between globalization and democracy; colonialism, Islam and Hinduism; and the ethics of international relations. Rather than simply documenting Tocqueville's own thoughts, the volume applies the Frenchman's insights to enduring dilemmas of democratization and cross-cultural exchanges in the twenty-first century. This is one of the few books to shift the focus of Tocqueville studies away from America and Western Europe, expanding the frontiers of democracy and highlighting the international dimensions of Tocqueville's political thought.

Covenant and Constitutionalism, the third of four volumes in the series of volumes exploring the covenantal tradition in Western politics, traces the trends and the developing relationships of constitutionalism and covenant that ultimately led to the transformation of the latter into the former. It explores these first steps and the subsequent paths that emerged out of the constitutionalized covenantal tradition in Europe such as federalism, communitarianism, and the cooperative movement, and how these covenantal ideas and expressions were both supported by and challenged by liberal democracy and individualism as they unfolded in the latter part of the modern epoch and immediately thereafter. The book concludes with a look at the covenantal tradition at the beginning of the postmodern epoch and what may be a move to return to it in response to the crises accompanying the human transition to a new epoch after World War II.

This 1893 survey ranks among the most important books about the impact of frontier life on U.S. society. It examines the frontier's role in promoting self-reliance, independence, democracy, immigration, and westward expansion.