James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002)

Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)

Recent years have seen a remarkable renewal of interest in the thought of Benjamin Constant (1767–1830). For long recognized as the author of the literary masterpiece Adolphe, Constant is now receiving increasing attention for his political writings. Paperback editions of his major works are presently available in both French and English, helping to establish his growing reputation as a founding father of modern liberalism. Constant's stature as a seminal liberal thinker has benefited from the recent climate of opinion in the Western world and, in particular, from the return to fashion of liberalism as a social and political doctrine. Paradoxically, however, this political climate has also led to some problems, since presentist concerns have left an undeniable imprint on the image we have of Constant.

Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)

Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionism and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)

Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000)

D. G. Hart, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)

William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003)

John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003)