The Ashley Cooper Plan: the founding of Carolina and the origins of Southern political culture
"In The Ashley Cooper Plan, Thomas Wilson connects Anthony Ashley Cooper (the First Earl of Shaftesbury) and John Locke's seventeenth-century vision of well-ordered society to the design of cities in the Province of Carolina to current debates about the relationship about climate change, sustainable development, urbanity, and the place of expertise in general. This important work focuses on the ways in which political culture, ideology, and governing structures have shaped political acts and public policy and illuminates one of the fundamental paradoxes of American history: although the Ashley Cooper Plan was a model of rational planning, its utopian qualities were soon undermined by the lure of profits to be had from slaveholding. Wilson argues that the "Gothic" framework of the Carolina "Fundamental Constitutions" was stripped of its original imperative of class reciprocity in the transition to slavery, which reverberates in American politics to this day"--
