by Darren Staloff ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 4, 2005
A lucid argument, usefully extending the intellectual history of the American Revolution by interrogating three great...
City-slickers versus countryfolk, skeptics versus Bible-thumpers: the red state/blue state divide was there at the very start of the nation.
As Gertrude Himmelfarb groused in her grouchy Roads to Modernity (2004), there were several Enlightenments. Whereas she clearly prefers the English one to the icky French version, Staloff (History/CUNY; The Making of an American Thinking Class, 1997) finds virtues—but also failings—in the several approaches to the Enlightenment endorsed and even represented by three well-covered Founding Fathers. If Immanuel Kant defined the Enlightenment and its forebears in rationalism as “dare to know!,” then Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton expanded it to read “dare to act!” But each took a different tack. Hamilton found a perfect republic in the marketplace, marked by “commercial prosperity, economic growth, and social mobility”; by Staloff’s view, Hamiltonian man evolved into the New Yorker of today, full of moneymaking energy but not necessarily of the patrician graces. Jefferson, that “Romantic visionary,” took his cues from France, at least in part because he conceived such a great hatred of the English crown during the Revolution; the proposed Jay treaty drove him to distraction, as did what he regarded as Adams’s (and Hamilton’s) secret entreaties to the English in the postwar era, hoping to get the pounds rolling back to the ports of New York and New England. (Hamilton retorted by accusing Jefferson of having “a womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain.”) And Adams’s Enlightenment allowed a meritocracy, but certainly not a democracy: talent and genius were rare, he reckoned, and it was a fool’s job to suppose everyone equal; “No love of equality,” he railed, “ever existed in human nature.” Yet all embraced republicanism, if with different wrinkles, and associated doctrines whose origins were, Staloff notes, urban in origin, the stuff of smart coffeehouses and salons, hinging on access to the printed word and best read with at least some sense of irony and humor, and hopeful that the nation was capable of self-governance.
A lucid argument, usefully extending the intellectual history of the American Revolution by interrogating three great revolutionaries.Pub Date: July 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-8090-7784-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2018
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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