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Mattes, Armin

February 13, 2017 by admin

WORK TITLE: Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland
WORK NOTES:
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https://democracy.missouri.edu/about/postdocs-and-research-fellows/ * https://democracy.missouri.edu/about/post-docs/ * http://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4810 * http://www.jackmillercenter.org/kinder-postdoc-publishes-new-book-citizens-of-a-common-intellectual-homeland/

RESEARCHER NOTES:

LC control no.: n 2015008516
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2015008516
HEADING: Mattes, Armin
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670 __ |a Citizens of a common intellectual homeland, 2015: |b ECIP t.p. (Armin Mattes)
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PERSONAL

Male.

EDUCATION:

University of Virginia, Ph.D.

 

ADDRESS

  • Office - Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 65211

CAREER

Historian, educator, and writer. Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, Charlottesville, VA, Gilder Lehman research fellow, 2012-13; Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri, Columbia, research fellow, 2016-17. Previously taught at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and Eberhart Karls University, Tübingen, Germany.

WRITINGS

  • Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood, University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, VA), 2015

SIDELIGHTS

Historian Armin Mattes studied the origins of American democracy and nationhood during his doctoral studies. He is the author of Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Context of the Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood, 1775-1840. Mattes moves beyond the American context to further explain the development of democracy and nationhood, the pivotal legacies of the American Revolution. Exploring the co-emergence of modern democratic concepts and the nation on both sides of the Atlantic, in the United States and France, Mattes presents his case that the concepts’ origins were essentially identical in terms of arising from a shared revolutionary impulse that sought to rebel against the political and social order of the day, which was hierarchical in nature.

According to Mattes, the newly formed ideas of democracy and the nation were greatly influenced by the French Revolution. He stresses that these new outlooks went far beyond France’s borders in a way that was much more than a mere transference of ideas from France to other countries. In his discussion of the simultaneous, transatlantic emergence of modern ideas of democracy and nation, Mattes considers the writings of pairs of intellectual contemporaries writing on shared topics, with each pair featuring one writer based in Europe and one in America. These pairs of contemporaries include Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, who wrote about the revolutions, and John Adams and Friedrich von Gentz, who addressed the “mixed constitution,” a form of government combining elements of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. The other pairs considered are James Madison and Immanual Kant, who wrote about the idea of permanent peace in their essays respectively titled “Universal Peace” and “Perpetual Peace,” and Thomas Jefferson and Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who wrote on the concept of the nation.
 
Each chapter focuses on the work of one of these pairs of intellectuals. Throughout, Mattes consistently examines several themes or elements of American democracy, including equality, constitutionalism, popular sovereignty, and the boundaries of or exclusions from American nationhood. In discussing the idea of equality as explored by Paine and Burke, Mattes considers how this principle was understood and subsequently applied to modern concepts of democracy, especially in relation to the American and French revolutions.
 
Adams and von Getz wrote about theories concerning the mixed constitution. Mattes relates how their ideas were initially thought of as liberal but eventually considered to be aristocratic and conservative in nature. Madison and Kant both wrote about the idea of lasting peace, and Mattes explores how the two men both came to the same general conclusions about the possibility of lasting peace. Mattes also explores how the two men’s conclusions were largely based on various democratic principles. In the final chapter, on the thoughts of Jefferson and Destutt de Tracy, Mattes shows how their two concepts concerning the nation and democracy were different but emerged simultaneously and were in many ways interconnected. In the course of the book, Mattes reveals how some of the pairs of contemporaries were constantly in dialogue, such as Burke and Paine, while others, such as Madison and Kant, communicated through third-party mediation. In the book’s epilogue, Mattes writes about Alexis de Tocqueville as the first great theorist of modern democracy and discusses de Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America, first published in 1835.
 
“The great precision and clarity that characterize the arguments throughout Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland … make it quite unlikely that Mattes’s own intellectual homeland, as presented in this book, can fail to attract numerous future citizens,” wrote Hannah Spahn in a review in the Journal of Southern History. Calling Mattes’s effort “a well-written book,” Choice contributor D. Schaefer went on to note: “Especially interesting is Mattes’s account of how conflicting attitudes toward the French Revolution underlay the vitriolic Republican-Federalist split.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

  • Choice, December, 2015, D. Schaefer, review of Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood, p. 646.

  • Journal of Southern History, August, 2016, Hannah Spahn, review of Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland, p. 662.

ONLINE

  • Jack Miller Center Web site, http://www.jackmillercenter.org/ (July 6, 2015), review of Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland.

  • University of Missouri, Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy Web site, https://democracy.missouri.edu/ (March 16, 2017), author profile.

  • Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, VA), 2015
https://lccn.loc.gov/2014048322 Mattes, Armin. Citizens of a common intellectual homeland : the transatlantic origins of American democracy and nationhood / Armin Mattes. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, [2015] xi, 266 pages ; 24 cm JC421 .M397 2015 ISBN: 9780813938042 (cloth : alk. paper)
  • The University of Virginia Press - http://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4810

    About the Author:

    Armin Mattes is Research Fellow with the Kinder Forum on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri.

  • Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy - https://democracy.missouri.edu/events/kinder-fellow-armin-mattes-lecture-on-patronage-in-early-american-society/

    The Transformation of Patronage Politics: 1750-1850
    Fall 2014 History Colloquium with Postdoc Armin Mattes

    For the second meeting of the Kinder Forum’s Friday History Colloquium Series, Postdoctoral Research Fellow Armin Mattes provided a preview of his current book project, which will focus on changes to the practical meaning of patronage in America during the years 1750-1850. Using the example of Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Mattes first argued that, because of the network of intimate personal dependencies that it fostered, patronage had a significant hand in both shaping and maintaining the hierarchical structure of American social and political life in the colonial era. Mattes then examined Jefferson and Madison’s repudiation of how Hamilton used patronage to insulate his political initiatives from resistance, as well as John Quincy Adams’ meritocratic approach to office, before discussing the fundamental transformation of patronage that occurred during the age of Jacksonian democracy. Though “King Andrew” was widely critiqued for his spoils system, Dr. Mattes argued that Jackson actually democratized patronage on some level by re-imagining it as a means by which to create a political network of impersonal, egalitarian relationships. A Q&A and reception on the town followed the lecture, which was held in Gentry Hall on the University of Missouri campus.

    Also:
    Armin Mattes earned his Ph.D. in History at the University of Virginia, working with Peter Onuf on the origins of American democracy and nationhood. Dr. Mattes then spent the 2012-2013 academic year as the Gilder Lehrman Research Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, where he completed his first book, Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: the Transatlantic Context of the Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood, 1775-1840, which was published by University of Virginia Press in 2015. He is currently working on a new project that explores the transformation of the meaning and practice of political patronage in America from 1750 to 1850. Dr. Mattes has taught at the University of Virginia and Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany), and he will serve as a 2016-17 Kinder Research Fellow in History.

Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood
Hannah Spahn
Journal of Southern History. 82.3 (Aug. 2016): p662.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Full Text:
Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood. By Armin Mattes. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. [xiv], 266. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-3804-2.)

What may be most striking in a first perusal of this compelling history of the conceptual origins of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835-1840) is Armin Mattes's innovative approach, which can roughly be described as the unlikely but happy marriage between German conceptual history and an updated version of a much older method, one admired by the eighteenth-century revolutionaries themselves. Following Reinhart Koselleck's Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history), on the one hand, Mattes presents a clear-sighted historical analysis of key political terms of the revolutionary period, including democracy, aristocracy, equality, and nation. And on the other hand, Mattes employs a historiographical tool familiar since the days of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, pairing and comparing two political thinkers from each side of the water (the Atlantic, in Mattes's case) to shed light on the interdependent, transnational nature of these concepts. The four chapters resulting from this methodological union find instructive connections not only between men directly engaged in dialogue, such as Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson and Antoine Destutt de Tracy, but also between thinkers whose conversation depended on the mediation of a third party, as in the case of Friedrich Gentz and John Adams (who read Gentz in John Quincy Adams's translation), and between James Madison and Immanuel Kant, who were not biographically connected, but in whose cosmopolitan peace plans Mattes identifies parallels reaching down even to stylistic features--such as their respective reflections on governments of "angels" (p. 113).

In these chapters, which can be read individually but also build on one another, the intellectual lives of Mattes's modern Greeks and Romans yield many stimulating insights. Analyzing Paine's conception of individual equality, for instance, Mattes offers a convincing new explanation for the absence of systematic references to democracy before the second part of Paine's Rights of Man (1791). Mattes's account of the changing nature of aristocracy in the revolutionary period, to take another example, does not grant Burke his customary place at the center of an emerging modern conservatism, but instead reconstructs a heterogeneous "rational" line of early conservative thought in the writings of John Adams and Kant's former student and Burke's translator, Gentz (p. 66). Meanwhile, as Mattes argues in his careful discussion of the shared roots of modern concepts of democracy and nation in Tracy's and Jefferson's thought, the reinterpretation of these terms through the lens of the French Revolution generated the "new political language" that became the conceptual groundwork of Tocqueville's Democracy in America (p. 142). Tocqueville's work, which also provides the title quotation for Mattes's study, should accordingly be viewed as "an important lerestone rather than a beginning ... in the development of a modern concept of democracy" (p. 185). The great precision and clarity that characterize the arguments throughout Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood make it quite unlikely that Mattes's own intellectual homeland, as presented in this book, can fail to attract numerous future citizens.

HANNAH SPAHN

University of Potsdam

Spahn, Hannah

Mattes, Armin. Citizens of a common intellectual homeland: the transatlantic origins of American democracy and nationhood
D. Schaefer
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.04 (Dec. 2015): p646.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Full Text:
Mattes, Armin. Citizens of a common intellectual homeland: the transatlantic origins of American democracy and nationhood. Virginia, 2015. 266p bibl index afp ISBN 9780813938042 cloth, $45.00; ISBN 9780813938059 ebook, $45.00

53-1980

JC421

MARC

In this well-written book, Mattes (research fellow, Kinder Forum, Univ. of Missouri) aims to illuminate the late-18th-century development of the concepts of democracy and nationhood in America that resulted from the influence of the French Revolution. In each of his main four chapters, he compares the writings of one American and one European thinker on a common topic: Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke on the American and French Revolutions; John Adams and Friedrich von Gentz on the mixed constitution; James Madison and Immanuel Kant on "perpetual peace"; and Thomas Jefferson and Destutt de Tracy on the idea of the "nation." Especially interesting is Mattes's account of how conflicting attitudes toward the French Revolution underlay the vitriolic Republican-Federalist split in the 1790s, as Jeffersonians reinterpreted the American Revolution in light of the more radical concept of "democracy" developing in France, and led them to accuse opponents of the French Revolution like Alexander Hamilton and John Adams of being monarchists (or worse). Also noteworthy is the comparative analysis of Madison's and Kant's essays respectively titled "Universal Peace" and Perpetual Peace, arguing that they came to similar conclusions based on expectations of the progress of reason and the spread of republicanism. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.--D. Schaefer, College of the Holy Cross

Schaefer, D.

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