"Tending" and "Intending" a Nation: Conflicting Visions of American National Identity

Sheldon Wolin's categories of "tending" and "intending" expand the debate over the character of the American revolution and founding to include a central though often overlooked fact of late eighteenth-century America: the implications of the country's very fragile, ver...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Polity 1999-07, Vol.31 (4), p.561-586
Main Author: Fox, Russell Arben
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Communities
CONFLICT
Countries
Government
History
IDENTITY
Liberalism
National identity
National politics
NATIONALISM
Political debate
Political revolutions
Political science
Political theory
Republicanism
TRADITION
United States
UNITED STATES PRIOR TO 1945
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Sheldon Wolin's categories of "tending" and "intending" expand the debate over the character of the American revolution and founding to include a central though often overlooked fact of late eighteenth-century America: the implications of the country's very fragile, very modern sense of itself as a nation. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists articulated coherent conceptions of politics, bringing different elements of various liberal, republican and democratic paradigms together in defense of, respectively, "intendment" and "tendment" nationalities. Viewing their debates in light of this analysis not only demonstrates the complicated heritage of both the traditional liberal and republican positions, but also shows how these positions are inextricably connected with our own modern self-understanding. Wolin suggests that intending all but eliminated its rivals; it may be more accurate to say it absorbed them, merging different paradigms into a somewhat inconsistent, romantic, and very modern national identity.
ISSN:0032-3497
1744-1684
DOI:10.2307/3235236