“American men and women gravitated toward the moral center of politics to acknowledge their humility in the face of the past” (268). It was this humility, Robert Calhoon argues, that characterized early American conceptions and practices of moderation. Moderation was not about timidity and caution, but a historically grounded “compound of principle and prudence.” Calhoon's story begins in Greece in an attempt to build up the intellectual strength of the ethic. Rejecting the notion that weakness is a quality of moderation, he traces its origins to the Greek term “sophrosyne,” in which the idea of moderation grew out of the knowledge and respect combatants held for one another but was also linked to shame and the fear of reproach (2–3). In Aristotle's hands, moderation was turned into a broader moral virtue that moved between excess and deficiency. “Viewed from this perspective,” Calhoon argues, “moderation defined the very nature of humanity itself as a striving to measure up to the highest potentiality in relation to variables of time and circumstance” (4).

The book's core is four chapters on moderation in America, with separate chapters on colonial and revolutionary moderates, moderation in the backcountry, and religion. Each chapter, except the last, consists of a series of biographical snippets and episodes (sixteen in Chapter 3 alone), illustrating various episodes of political moderation. The final chapter, on the role of religion, focuses more on key religious ideas and institutions, with an occasional minibiography thrown in. In these chapters, Calhoon attempts to situate the flowering of moderation in the backcountry and in Protestant pluralism. “The backcountry was moderate,” Calhoon argues in italics, “because it was conflicted, conflicted because it was demographically dynamic, and demographically dynamic because ethnic identities were grounded in religion.” It appears that it was the dynamism, the need for associationalism, and the creation of political institutions—social, cultural, legal, and constitutional—that drove much of this moderation.

One of the weaknesses of the book is Calhoon's use of biographical snippets. This approach makes it difficult to determine both what is idiosyncratic and what constitutes moderation. This approach also gets in the way of explaining the role that moderation has played in American public life. Indeed, at key moments in the book, Calhoon suggests moderation was not responsible for historical change. For instance, while attempting to place “revolutionary moderates at the moral center,” he argues that “skilled practitioners of moderate politics that they were, Washington, Adams, and Marshall attained political greatness albeit for reasons transcending their moderation” (144). Calhoon is on stronger ground when dealing with questions of law and statecraft. Importantly, Calhoon ends this story of political moderation with law and governance. Statecraft, he suggests, is “quintessentially moderate,” as is the custom and precedent that characterizes the common law. This is a reminder that moderation has long been at the core of our understanding of law and governance, as evidenced by basic legal terms such as “juris-prudence,” or the more recent term “legis-prudence,” or the newly coined “demos-prudence.” Prudence, moderation, humility—these are ethics that have long been built into Western conceptions of law and government. Viewed in this way, legal historians may want to read Calhoon's book in combination with William Novak's The People's Welfare and Laura Edwards's The People and their Peace to understand the relationship between law and moderation in the nineteenth century. More broadly, legal historians could build on Calhoon's book by focusing more on the relationship between law and political ethics, a project Francis Lieber started in the 1830s with his Manual of Political Ethics, a book, as the subtitle indicated, directed to “students of law” (and a key omission in a book on political ethics in American history, particularly one including the nineteenth century).

Finally, it is hard to read a book on moderation in 2009 without thinking about the global economic crisis and whether there's a moral to be drawn from this work. Calhoon argues, in fact, that tragic consequences flow when we turn our backs to moderation. And that certainly seems to be the case with the exuberant pursuit of sub-prime mortgages, and the myriad other business and regulatory practices that appear to be at the root of the crisis. While there have been greater tragedies that have flowed from an arrogance towards history, as opposed to a humility in the face of it, we should pause to consider whether the modern economic thinking, amoral profit-seeking, and models of education rooted in business and economic concepts have run their course and are due for a reinvigorated commitment to a new ethic of moderation.