The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, and Santayana

Asking why many American intellectuals have had such difficulty accepting wholeheartedly the cultural dimensions of democracy, Robert Dawidoff examines their alienation and ambivalence, a tradition of detachment he identifies as “Tocquevillian.” In the work of three towering American literary figures - Henry Adams, Henry James, and George Santayana — Dawidoff explores fully this distancing and uneasy response to democratic culture.

Linked together by common Harvard, Cambridge, and New Englan...