Rodgers, Daniel. “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept.” Journal of American History 79:1 (June 1992): 11-38.

== Summary ==
This
article looks at the paradigm of “republicanism” in American historiography. He
argues that the concept of republicanism was a not a logical notion, but a
interpretive one used to unlock basic riddles of American politics and
political culture, sometimes in conjunction with multiple, contradictory needs.
Its history, then, reflect how historians argue and how concepts persuade.
Rodgers sees three different paradigms of the republican synthesis: Beardian,
Harzian, and republican. “The Beardian paradigm organized American history
around a restless sea of conflict material interests; the Harzian around a
stable liberal consensus; the republic around the importance of liberalism’s
precedents and rivals.” Republicanism paradigm plagued by issues: “a succession
of explanatory structures, its development by leapfrogging between
traditionally isolated subdisciplines and problematics, its ability to explain
so many urgent puzzles together with a certain inner vagueness of its own.” Each
conflicted with the other, revealing weakness such that Republicanism, while in
opposition to Harzian liberalism, was difficult to define and perceive. Rodgers
concludes that “the gift of republicanism, as an explanatory concept, lay in
its ability to do so much disparate interpretive work,” yet it was also
employed to serve too many ends and ran the danger of explaining everything.'''
See also: Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Linda Kerber, and Gary Nash