Critical Americans : Victorian intellectuals and transatlantic liberal reform / Leslie Butler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Butler, Leslie, 1969-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Liberalism--United States--History--19th century.

Liberalism.

Democracy.

History.

Politics and culture.

United States.

Politics and culture--United States--History--19th century.

Democracy--United States--History--19th century.

Physical Description:

xv, 381 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2007]

Summary:

In an intellectual history of American liberalism during the second half of the nineteenth century. Leslie Butler examines a group of nationally prominent and internationally oriented writers who sustained an American tradition of self-consciously progressive and cosmopolitan reform. She addresses how these men established a critical perspective on American racism, materialism, and jingoism in the decades between the 1850s and the 1890s while she recaptures their insistence on the ability of ordinary citizens to work toward their limitless potential as intelligent and moral human beings.

At the core of Butler's study are the writers George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, a quartet of friends who would together define the humane liberalism of America's late Victorian middle class. In creative engagement with such British intellectuals as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, John Ruskin, James Bryce, and Goldwin Smith, these "critical Americans" articulated political ideals and cultural standards to suit the burgeoning mass democracy the Civil War had created. This transatlantic framework informed their notions of educative citizenship, print-based democratic politics, critically informed cultural dissemination, and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy. Butler argues that a careful reexamination of these strands of late nineteenth-century liberalism can help enrich a revitalized liberal tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century.

Contents:

1 Victorian Duty, American Scholars, and National Crisis 17

Manlike Let Him Turn and Face the Danger 20

The World's Eye...the World's Heart 26

To Cheer, to Raise, and to Guide Men by Showing Them Facts amidst Appearances 35

This Revolution Is to Be Wrought by the Gradual Domestication of the Ideal of Culture 42

2 The War for the Union and the Vindication of American Democracy 52

Understanding That a "Democracy Can Think" 54

Emancipating the Public Opinion of the North 63

A Struggle of the Antidemocrats with the Democrats 69

Conquering the Old World 74

3 The Liberal High Tide and Educative Democracy 87

The Tide Is Turning in Favor of Liberalism 89

The Total Overthrow of the Spirit of Caste 98

To Exercise Their Minds on the Great Social and Political Questions 109

Modern Republicans Must Be Reading Republicans 121

4 Liberal Culture in a Gilded Age 128

Something Better Than Riches...Something Utterly Apart from This World's Wealth 131

Still Colonists and Provincials in Culture 142

A Passion for Diffusing 153

There Is No Country Where Genuine Criticism...Is More Needed 165

5 The Politics of Liberal Reform 175

A Sovereign to Whose Voice Everyone Listens 178

Slackening the Bonds of Party Tyranny 191

Unable to Beget or Bear...Doomed to Sterility, Isolation, and Extinction 200

The Political Interest of the World Is Centered in America 208

6 Global Power and the Illiberalism of Empire 221

Subordinating Public Policy to Moral Law 224

Ireland Is England's Touchstone, as Slavery Was Ours 232

America Has...Chosen the Path of Barbarism 241

Imperialism-the Great Moral Plague of Our Time...on Both Sides of the Atlantic 249.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [325]-360) and index.

ISBN:

9780807830840

0807830844

9780807857922

0807857920

OCLC:

76871356