Political Justice in a Republic

Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper’s America by John P. McWilliams, Jr. offers the first sustained exploration of Cooper’s fiction as a vehicle for political philosophy. Rather than treating Cooper as either an apolitical romancer or a failed imitator of Scott, McWilliams demonstrates how his novels repeatedly stage contests over law, loyalty, and justice in the “neutral ground” of a changing America. From the Revolutionary War to the unsettled frontier, Cooper dramatized questions of national identity and the foundations of republican order, seeing literature as an instrument of civic instruction and a defense of constitutional ideals. Drawing on Cooper’s entire career, McWilliams situates the Leatherstocking Tales and later social fictions within debates about divine, natural, moral, and civil law, as well as shifting notions of patriotism, property, and political authority. He argues that Cooper remained a consistent republican thinker, committed to conserving the liberties of the original republic even as American society and its politics changed around him. The book thus reclaims Cooper as a serious political and cultural critic whose fiction grappled with enduring dilemmas of democracy, law, and social order—issues as relevant to modern readers as to his nineteenth-century audience. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.