Review: Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government, 1776–1865
How is it that America became a “strong but limited” government, and the world’s richest and most free country? That is the central question both considered and answered by Luigi Marco Bassani in his new work, Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government, 1776–1865. As an eminent scholar, Bassani has long studied the antebellum area, Amercia’s struggle between national vs. local power, and the Jeffersonian tradition that colored the era.