The American Mind

by Allen C. Guelzo

Americans pride themselves on being doers rather than thinkers, but ideas are at the very root of what it means to be an American. Behind this nation's diverse views on religion, education, social equality, democracy, and other vital issues is a long-running intellectual debate about the right ordering of the human, natural, and divine worlds. Indeed, America is an enduring hotbed of ideas. Such great thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, William James, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others engaged in lively and often contentious debate that helped mold America's institutions and attitudes. This immensely stimulating conversation made the United States what it is today - and provides the subject for these 36 fascinating lectures. In this course, you will delve deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of the nation, forged by the Puritans and the leaders of the American Revolution. You will also explore many other aspects of the elaborate structure that became modern America, tracing ideas in politics, religion, education, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, literature, social theory, and science - proving that Americans have a much richer intellectual tradition than generally imagined. You'll learn about such philosophical movements as transcendentalism, pragmatism, and conservatism. You'll study the transatlantic philosophy of the Puritans, the spiritual revival of the Great Awakening, and the passion for reason sparked by the Enlightenment. And you'll trace the origin and evolution of America's colleges, which have served as a battleground of ideas, sometimes in an almost literal sense.

3 Part Set, Lectures 1-36

Genres: History, Philosophy, Audiobook, American History, Politics, Religion, Nonfiction

Audio CD

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Allen Carl Guelzo (born 1953) is the Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, where he serves as Director of the Civil War Era Studies Program.

Reviews

[William Adam Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 36 lecture course by Professor Allen Guelzo is the third Great Course that I have listened to by this professor. The other two were The American Revolution and The History of the United States, which Professor Guelzo took the first section of, up to the Civil War. I enjoyed this course much better than the American Revolution course. I found this course went much deeper into areas that I was unfamiliar with, and I always enjoy learning new things.

Professor Guelzo has a clear speaking style and is a thoughtful lecturer. He has a practiced cadence to his delivery, which can make for dramatic presentations. This course takes a journey through the major themes that Americans have been thinking about since they set up the thirteen colonies, beginning in the 17th century. Some of the topics presented include religious orthodoxy, the enlightenment, personal freedoms, the debate over slavery, religious reform, the rise of science, the purposes of education, the role of government in the private lives of Americans, the protection of the rights of minorities, and liberalism contrasted with conservatism. I was especially pleased to learn more about the thought of Reinhold Niebur and Josiah Royce.

There was an emphasis on what movements were popular in the universities, which makes sense because they are the centers of new ideas emerging. There were some thinkers that I had not heard of before, which gave me an excuse to do some more research to learn more about some of their ideas. I was very satisfied with this course and look forward to revisiting it again the future.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
An excellent survey of Am. intellectual history. With such a broad topic, it couldn't delve into any one topic too deeply, so it's a valuable jumping off point for anyone interested in such sub-topics as colonial great awakening theology, post civil war pragmatism, democratic progressivism, and modern consumerism, among others. The professor is excellent and I highly recommend this course to anyone wanting to get an overview of Am. intellectual history.

[Mack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good. Interesting. I don't suppose there is a theory, an overarching theory that fits the American mind together from beginning to end, or it would be here. Still, there are some great fragments; early America fits together pretty well. When it gets complex, though, after the Civil War, and after 1900, connecting the far-flung and diverse neurons of the American mind is apparently not readily doable. And, toward the end, I found myself thinking that I was getting Fox News' interpretation of American history. Overall, I enjoyed the series of lectures, and I learned from them, but there is a heavy tilt toward church history and written intellectual history in something like the European mold - and for a country built largely and often on a pioneer spirit - there is no pioneer spirit here.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the Great Courses and this has earned a place as one of my favorites. It is a fascinating, enlightening course. I hope to listen to it again one day which is very rare praise for me.

Dr. Guelzo begins with the Puritans and ends with neo-conservatives in showing how American thought has been shaped through the centuries, focusing especially on how rationalism and romanticism have interacted in forging the values and ideas that characterize us. Along the way I learned to better appreciate the influence of names I have heard all my life (Jonathan Edwards, Charles Darwin, John Dewey, etc) and learned the significant part men whose names I had never heard of before played in changing the way we think (William James, Josiah Royce, etc).

I have read many books on history that cover what happened and maybe why it happened, but this led me to think deeper questions about how we think about what happens, why we tend to think that way and the influences behind shifts in our thinking. It is admittedly new territory for me so I am not the best judge, but it seemed to me that Dr. Guelzo did a good job of fairly presenting the ideas and person of each figure.

I listened to it on CDs while driving.

[Aaron Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intellect vs. Will
Act vs. Think
Religion and the Enlightenment
Liberal Capitalism
Pragmatism
America as World Power


1. The Intellectual Geography of America

Is there an American mind? The view of Americans as doers rather than thinkers has been reinforced by the way American intellectual history is traditionally taught. However, this approach is suspect because it ignores large parts of the national debate over ideas.

2. The Technology of Puritan Thinking

As colonizers, the Puritans brought with them a vibrant intellectual life, born partly of the Calvinist Reformation and partly of medieval scholasticism. But they also brought with them unresolved problems over the intellect and the will.

3. The Enlightenment in America

The Enlightenment made its first beachheads in America in the colonial colleges, beginning at Harvard and including the College of William and Mary, the Academy of Philadelphia, and Yale. The attraction of Enlightenment thinking was both intellectual and cultural.

4. Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening

Jonathan Edwards was influenced by the immaterialism of British philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, using that philosophical base to criticize compromisers among the ranks of New England Puritanism. Ultimately, immaterialism became linked to Edwards's role in the spiritual revival known as the Great Awakening.

5. The Colonial Colleges

The Great Awakening was a major force in establishing new colleges in colonial America, as angry Awakeners turned their backs on institutions such as Yale and Harvard and founded alternative colleges. But these colleges were quickly absorbed into the intellectual life of the Enlightenment.

6. Republican Fundamentals

As the American colonies prospered, the British government took steps to regulate that prosperity. The colonies resented this intrusion and found in the classical liberalism of English Whig political theorists a ready explanation for the legitimacy of their own governments.

7. Nature’s God and the American Revolution

Long in gestation, the ideas that made the American Revolution trace back to the Enlightenment resistance to authority, the colonists' religious radicalism, and the example of the English Whigs. All that was needed to set off revolt was the British government's attempt to override the colonies' own assemblies.

8. Deism, Science, and Revolution

If America was the darling of the Enlightenment, then the Enlightenment's favorite location in America was Philadelphia, thanks to its extraordinary collection of thinkers and institutions, and to its commitment to reconciling science and religion in the spirit of Scottish "common sense" philosophy.

9. Hamilton and His Money

Only when America's Whigs had a republic on their hands did they realize that there was no agreement on what shape a republic should take—whether it should follow the example of Jefferson and classical republicanism or the commercial liberal republicanism of Alexander Hamilton.

10. Jefferson and His Debts

Jefferson is revered as the author of the Declaration of Independence and a paragon of reason. However, his experience of debt drove him to romanticize the glories of independent farming and promote policies that broke the old revolutionary coalition into Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties.

11. The Edwardseans—From Hopkins to Finney

The Revolution was a disappointment to religious leaders who hoped to ride its victories to new levels of moral and cultural authority. But the disciples of Jonathan Edwards soon learned how to restart the energies of revival and reverse the fall of the republic into Enlightenment secularism.

12. The Moral Philosophers

Scottish "common sense" philosophy became a vehicle by which religious thinkers reintroduced religious morality into public life by cloaking it in "natural law." These moral philosophers would have enjoyed even greater influence had they not failed to solve the knottiest of American problems in public ethics: slavery.

13. Whigs and Democrats

Although Republican political theory deplored political parties, both Jefferson and Hamilton emerged as the heads of parties in the 1790s. Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans dominated Hamilton's Federalists, but the Jeffersonians themselves split in the 1830s, spawning the Whigs, led by Henry Clay.

14. American Romanticism

The Enlightenment's glorification of reason eventually fostered a backlash in the form of Romanticism. The influence of religious revivalism and the distaste for democratic politics combined to breed an American Romanticism, with New England Transcendentalism as its most talented manifestation.

15. Faith and Reason at Princeton

The challenge offered to religion by Enlightenment reason was never as stark as it seemed. Many Enlightenment figures continued to experiment in religion, and many religious thinkers assimilated the principles of reason into more persuasive forms of belief, notably at the Princeton Theological Seminary.

16. Romanticism in Mercersburg

American Romanticism often manifested itself as a rebellion against past authority. However, some conservative forms of Romanticism embraced the past and glorified tradition and history as a different way of questioning the supremacy of reason.

17. Slaveholders and Abolitionists

The use of slave labor was the one blot on the record of American liberty, made all the more disgraceful by the way it defined slaves as chattel property. Most embarrassing of all, slavery was attacked not on the basis of Enlightenment reason but by radical religious Romantics.

18. Lincoln and Liberal Democracy

Lincoln's election as president finally delivered the nation's political initiative into the hands of an opponent of slavery. The ensuing Civil War allowed him both to destroy slavery and to install the Whig economic and political agenda as the reigning American ideology.

19. The Failure of the Genteel Elite

Despite its success at preserving the Union, the Civil War and the corruption that followed in its wake disillusioned many American thinkers with religious orthodoxy and democratic society. The postwar decades became the "Gilded Age," dominated by corporate models of organization and cynical social critics.

20. Darwin in America

Published in 1859, Darwin's Origin of Species had a delayed impact in America because of the Civil War. But in the postwar decades, Darwin's ideas undermined support of a public role for religion and spawned social philosophies that lauded unrestrained economic competition.

21. Liberalism and the Social Gospel

Evolution posed a moral problem to thinkers who embraced a Darwinian account of human origins but shrank from applying the logic of natural selection to human society. The result was a struggle to accommodate religion to Darwinism, which flowered into religious liberalism and the Social Gospel.

22. The Agony of William James

No family in America followed an intellectual path as tortured as that of William James, whose own life was a struggle to reconcile Darwin, materialism, and science with religion. It was only in pragmatism that James found room for hope and peace of mind.

23. Josiah Royce—The Idealist Dissenter

If pragmatism suited James as a replacement for absolutes, it left Josiah Royce unsatisfied. Royce represents both the last serious effort by an American philosopher to build a workable notion of idealism, as well as the last American philosopher to command an important public audience for philosophy.

24. John Dewey and Social Pragmatism

Influenced by the postwar battles of capital and labor, John Dewey translated James's pragmatism into an optimistic but morally relativistic social policy, in which social democracy rather than the assuagement of personal doubt was the ultimate objective.

25. Socialism in America

The postwar wave of corporate industrial organization was met by an opposing wave of working-class resistance, and that resistance was frequently attracted by the promise of socialism. Socialism as an ideology, however, had few takers in America.

26. Populists, Progressives, and War

In the 1880s, widespread grievances of farmers crystallized in the Populist Movement, while the most important reform ideology among the middle class was Progressivism, where the main concern was not about redistribution or revolution but about efficiency.

27. Decade of the Disenchanted

The idealism with which Woodrow Wilson led America into World War I and the disappointments that followed produced a deeply jaded rejection of all idealisms, moral and political. The great voices of the 1920s were its skeptics, cynics, and mockers.

28. The Social Science Revolution

The idea that human societies could be reduced to scientific analysis was another byproduct of the Enlightenment, which saw no reason why the discovery of physical law should not be matched by the discovery of social law.

29. The New South versus the New Negro

The post-Civil War South was torn between a romantic attachment to the "Lost Cause" myth and submission to the industrial system of the victorious North. Two backward-looking trends that emerged were the New Agrarians of the 1930s and the Jim Crow legislation imposed on American blacks.

30. FDR and the Intellectuals

The Great Depression traumatized the American psyche and, with the election of Franklin Roosevelt, brought about a dramatic realignment of American political life. The Depression also turned American intellectuals decisively against industrial capitalism and even drove many to embrace Communism.

31. Science under the Cloud

The development of the atomic bomb was both a tremendous public achievement for American scientists and the origin of a serious moral dilemma—all the more so since the culture of American science was built around the conviction that moral dilemmas were unscientific.

32. Ironic Judgments

Considered the greatest American theologian of his day, Reinhold Niebuhr exposed the facile underpinnings of liberal optimism. His skepticism came mixed with an urgency to separate ethics from perfectionism so that it could function in the real-world struggle against totalitarianism.

33. Mass Culture and Mass Consumption

The rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the 1930s propelled a wave of intellectual immigration to America. But many émigrés were shocked by the grip of commercial culture on American thinking. The American response in the 1950s was to glorify mass culture and turn it into an art form, pop art.

34. Integration and Separation

The persistence of segregation left black intellectuals looking for radical solutions. It was a mainstream religious figure, Martin Luther King, Jr., who guided the black struggle for civil rights back onto the path of integration into American society and culture.

35. The Rebellion of the Privileged

World War II was a triumph over fascism, but not necessarily in favor of liberal democracy. The Vietnam War radicalized both American intellectuals and a new generation of college students into a New Left—a movement that eventually wilted in the face of government hostility and public indifference.

36. The Neo-Conservatives

Erected by émigré intellectuals after World War II, American conservatism was a composite movement, combining elements of religious dissent and secular liberalism. It also offered a viable intellectual alternative for Americans who remained fundamentally loyal to the liberalism of the Founders.

[Koit · Rating 4 out of 5]

So… This was a complex work, though still more an introduction given the span of time Mr Guelzo covered. It would be difficult to summarize four centuries no matter what the topic was, so the relative success achieved here is noteworthy. Also, I found that the author’s explanations for some modern philosophies were both good and helpful—that having previously been a topic I had tried to avoid.

We start with 17th century Puritans and the set-up of universities in New England. This is followed by the Enlightenment and the Revolution, into 19th century political philosophy, which again was a very interesting aspect of the development of American thought. The Post-Civil War period was similarly thorough, with a lot of emphasis on Dewey whose named I’d heard before but didn’t know much about.

In a similar vein, the passage of time continues into the late 1980’s and features Reagan’s rise as the Republican candidate. In a way, the story comes full circle, and Mr Guelzo does try to take advantage of this by highlighting the “six persistent truths” though only three of them were “constant” in time: the struggle between intellect and will, the importance of religious ideas, and the struggle between religion and enlightenment for the main ideas.

I’m sure some could find arguments to bring against such a simplified view, but I think it works as an introduction into American philosophy. The author is also likely to introduce the un-inducted to at least a few new names which can be helpful.

This review was originally posted on my blog.

[Don Heiman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Teaching Company’s course “The American Mind” by Professor Allen Guelzo was released in 2005. The 36 lecture course traces the development of American thinking about citizen notions of intellect and actions in the context of religious ideas, American enlightenment principles, and the struggle between libertarian thought and post Civil War secular pragmatism. The course concludes with a discussion of America’s rise to world power through two world wars. The lectures contributed greatly to my understanding of the forces behind liberal and conservative capitalistic values. I especially liked Prof Guelzo’s enthusiastic presentations and his emphasis on key thoughts that stimulate listener focus and remembrance. The course book glossary and bibliography notes are exceptional. (P)

[Gebo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely worth a listen. This is an excellent survey of the (mostly) male side of the American mind. It begins with Puritans and ends with Neo-Conservatives. It helped me to better understand many things--most fascinating for me, how the hippie generation splintered into different groups, including becoming Neo-Conservatives. It has some lacks and gaps (women in particular, but also analytic philosophy); however, considering the breadth of his topic, this was bound to happen. My major complaint is that is was not longer! One of the few Teaching Company courses I completed and wished for more!

[Singleton Makin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This author/professor is a master of speaking with enthusiasm and makes what could be deemed boring subject matter into a conversation about history philosophy religion and politics with characters that made it history.

This was a library book on tape audio in his real voice

Highly recommend this for anyone who desires to learn more about America history in religion philosophy politics and science .

[Benjamin Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guelzo was more engaging than other Great American Courses I’ve done. Hard to take it all in over audio. Will probably relisten to parts in the future.

[Bonny Elwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A combination of philosophy, theology, psychology, political history, church history, and social history. Although occasionally dry, certain amazingly eye-opening insights made it worth the time.

[John Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great review of various American movements and intellectual develops from pre America to the 1970s. Many movements that have been forgotten but still influence us today.

[Chip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense but very interesting.

[Charles Gonzalez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Am just completing my second listening of this course by Professor Guelzo. I loved (on my favorites) his Gettysburg and so purchased this course to get his take and a deeper understanding of American intellectual history. I was unprepared for the breadth and depth of the course and appreciated especially his focus on American religious thought and its impact on 18th and 19th century American intellectual and political development. In Guelzo's lectures Johanthan Edwards comes alive as a profound influence on American thought, an interesting counterpoint to my earlier reading of Goodreads author Alan Johnson's "The First American Founder; Roger Williams and th Freedom of Conscience". The lectures cover all the ground around the Revolutionary period and Constitution to illuminate the impact of Enlightenment thought on the development and execution of American republican thought. As might be expected his lecture on Lincoln and the Civil War is outstanding ending with an elegiac reading of the Second Inagrual that highlights Lincoln's steady progress from Enlightenment influenced inheritor of the Founders to the deeply spiritual leader of the unified nation that cost so much to preserve. Succeeding lectures take the student through the Gilded Age's excesses and leads to Progressism and the coming socialist reaction to the Depression. The course warrants , as so many of the Great Courses do, a second, even third listening to take it all in.

[Hank Pharis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Guelzo is one of the best teachers I have ever heard. However surveying America's Intellectual History is a daunting assignment. Thus this was good but not as good as the other courses I've heard by him. But a big part of the problem may also be mine because I was usually busy working when I was listening to these. Still this was definitely worthwhile.

(Note that I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book.
3 = Very good; 4 = Outstanding; 5 = All time favorites.)