...has been posted at National Review.
Excerpt:
Although Thompson calls his approach “new moral history,” it’s not new so much as a return to an older style of historiography — one the Founders themselves were familiar with. Edward Gibbon, no less than Tacitus and Thucydides, saw history in terms of the causes and consequences of moral beliefs. (Jefferson called Tacitus his favorite writer because “his book is a compound of history and morality of which we have no other example.”) But historiography today has become so saturated with the historicism and relativism that Thompson describes that the notion of moral ideas’ being true, as opposed to merely influential, is viewed as quaint superstition. The only hope of combating such attitudes — and of vindicating and preserving the principles of the American Revolution — is to be found in careful and faithful scholarship such as this.
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