THE GOOD FIGHT

Idealism and rhetoric from the former senator and presidential candidate (Russia Shakes the World, 1991, etc.). These 20 essays present a kind of intellectual history of the somewhat legendary author. Replete with references to Jefferson, Kierkegaard, Parnell, Wesley, and other favorites, they range from a discussion of the difficulty of attaining what is decent, humane, and civilized (``The Search for the Just'') to considerations of Tolstoy's thought (``A Bear in the Den With God''), the cheapening effect of advertising on politics (``The Age of Cleverness, Courtiers and Careerists''), and a Menckenish discussion of Reagan's 80's (``The Era of Quayle''). Hart is at his best when pondering the ``Jeffersonian Revolution,'' exploring that Founding Father's idea that revolution is more or less necessary to avoid the decisions (and debts) of foolish fathers being visited upon their sons. But the most striking piece here is a warm tribute to former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. More often, though, Hart evinces an Olympian third-person detachment (``the boy''; ``this perplexed reformer,'' etc.), and his tracing of his sensibility and thought process can be overbearing in its persistent sense of virtue. The writing is clear but stiff and dated, full of rhetorical questions: ``How could a policy maker, not to say a reformer, know the proper course?'' And Hart's hortatory agent-of-change presumption is dated as well—much of what he deals with here was digested and acted upon by the American public in the election of 1992. The author, writing about history, seems himself to be a part of it. Hart is a clear, if unoriginal, thinker, but, here, he's as much a witness to his own dreams as to real world events.