Reconstructing America / Nancy G. Slack.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Slack, Nancy G., Author.

Contributor:

Wilson, Edward O.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National characteristics, American.

Americanization.

United States--Foreign public opinion, European.

United States.

France--Intellectual life.

France.

Germany--Intellectual life.

Germany.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, [1997]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

For too many people, America has become the primary symbol of all that is grotesque, deadening, and oppressive-or, as Heidegger once put it, the "emerging monstrousness of modern times." This image of a degenerate America, constructed by European intellectuals, has been gradually accepted within the United States, for America is now under siege by its own philosophers, literary critics, and postmodern thinkers. It is time, says James Ceaser in this provocative book, to take America back, to reaffirm confidence in our principles, and to remind ourselves that the real Americas opposed to the symbolic one has forged a system of liberal democratic government that has shaped the destiny of the modern world.With wit and passion, Ceaser traces the origins of the negative images of America, beginning with French scientists in the middle of the eighteenth century who viewed the country as a land of racial and physical degeneracy, and continuing with German thinkers from Hegel to Nietzsche, Spengler, and Heidegger, who viewed America as culturally inferior and a technological wasteland. Ceaser puts these critics of America in a dialogue with the country's defenders-among them Alexander Hamilton, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Leo Strauss. By revealing the sources of the hostility to America, Ceaser undermines the position of its present attackers. He contends that only if we reassert political science rather than cultural and literary criticism as the proper intellectual discipline to direct politics will we free the real America from the symbolic America and vindicate its name.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. America as Degeneracy

2. American Responses to the Degeneracy Thesis

3. America in the Mirror of France: The Two Revolutions

4. America as a Racial Symbol: The "New History" of Arthur de Gobineau

5. From Ethnology to Multiculturalism

6. Racialism Versus Political Science: The Tocqueville-Gobineau Exchange

7. From America to Americanization: Images of America in German Thought

8. Katastrophenhaft: Martin Heidegger's America

9. America as the End of History

10. America as Postmodern

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780300147803

0300147805

OCLC:

1023994042