This is a superb collection of essays. Appleby is the foremost critic of the so-called ‘republican synthesis’ that has come to pervade a number of disciplines besides history… The debate over republicanism is still very much alive and her essays reveal a sharp and shrewd analytical mind ideally equipped for argument. These pieces are less traditional reconstructions of the past and more historical polemics, and as polemics they have had and will continue to have a major influence on our understanding of early American history.

- Gordon S. Wood, Brown University,

Joyce Appleby is one of the most subtle intellectual historians at work these days, and the essay is the art form that comes most comfortably to her… Read together, one is impressed by the steadiness and force of her writing style. These essays position Joyce Appleby as an intellectual historian who has carved out a space between what she calls ‘The Cambridge School’—Pocock, Skinner, et al.—and the older tradition which concentrated on Locke and Hobbes largely abstracted from the social context in which they lived. Appleby is exemplary in her insistence that we search for the economic context in which some thoughts about government seem persuasive and in which others do not; she is sensitive to class as few intellectual historians are.

- Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa,