Rediscovering The Early and Important Catholic American Political Thinker Political Thinker Orestes Brownson

Inside Catholic has a nice short piece here at Orestes Brownson and Territorial Democracy /

It says in part:
Catholics would do well to remember Brownson (1803-1876), as he is at once one of the nation's most interesting political thinkers and a writer who addressed the complicated question of being both Catholic and American. He is also an American original: Born of Vermont Protestant stock, a friend to Emerson and a member of the Transcendentalist inner circle, Brownson became a Catholic in 1844, as did his good friend Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulist order; both had spent time at the Transcendentalist camp at Brook Farm. Before his conversion, however, Brownson had been through almost every variant of religious experience the country had to offer, from Methodism to Unitarianism, from Transcendentalist to "philosophical" Christian, before finally being received into the Church. ......

His most famous book-length work is probably the political treatise The American Republic, published in 1865. After Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, it has been called the best book on American democracy. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Woodrow Wilson considered Brownson one of the few true political thinkers America has produced.

Yet he has remained virtually unknown outside Catholic intellectual circles, though now and then there are mini-revivals. After a period of neglect, Brownson is slowly regaining his reputation. Russell Kirk and Gregory Butler, for example, have each edited a Brownson anthology, and Patrick Carey recently wrote an excellent biography.


In The American Republic, Brownson sought to explain American government in light of the Civil War. Out of that great conflict a new nation had arisen; what was its relation to the old? Some had argued that each of the states had independent existences that could survive the dissolution of the Union. Others believed the nation was, or should become, a unitary state, centralized in Washington. To Brownson, both sides were wrong. The states were neither pre-existing nations that had "contracted" with one another, nor were they mere provinces of a general government. The former, for Brownson, contradicted principles of sovereignty; the latter equated the federal system with the centralized democracy of Jacobin France. ..........

I intend to explore him some this weekend

There is even a nice Brownson Society web page