Moral Imagination

by David Bromwich

Overview

Compelling essays from one of today's most esteemed cultural critics

Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These wide-ranging essays address thinkers and topics from Gandhi and Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, to the dangers of identity politics, to the psychology of the heroes of classic American literature.

Bromwich demonstrates that moral imagination allows us to judge the right and wrong of actions apart from any benefit to ourselves, and he argues that this ability is an innate individual strength, rather than a socially conditioned habit. Political topics addressed here include Edmund Burke and Richard Price's efforts to define patriotism in the first year of the French Revolution, Abraham Lincoln’s principled work of persuasion against slavery in the 1850s, the erosion of privacy in America under the influence of social media, and the use of euphemism to shade and anesthetize reactions to the global war on terror. Throughout, Bromwich considers the relationship between language and power, and the insights language may offer into the corruptions of power.

Moral Imagination captures the singular voice of one of the most forceful thinkers working in America today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691161419
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/30/2014
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His many books include A Choice of Inheritance, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Skeptical Music, winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

ONE

1 Moral Imagination 3

2 A Dissent on Cultural Identity 40

3 The Meaning of Patriotism in 1789 70

TWO

4 Lincoln and Whitman as Representative Americans 91

5 Lincoln's Constitutional Necessity 118

6 Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Ambition 160

THREE

7 The American Psychosis 183

8 How Publicity Makes People Real 222

9 The Self-Deceptions of Empire 250

FOUR

10 What Is the West? 273

11 Holy Terror and Civilized Terror 287

12 Comments on Perpetual War 304

Cheney’s Law 304

Euphemism and Violence 310

William Safire: Wars Made out of Words 324

What 9/11 Makes Us Forget 330

The Snowden Case 334

Index 345

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"David Bromwich is the most penetrating cultural critic in contemporary America. No one writes more shrewdly or eloquently about the pathologies of our public discourse. His essays are grounded in a firm grasp of modern intellectual history, but he wears his learning lightly. Moral Imagination reveals Bromwich's extraordinary combination of aesthetic elegance and ethical seriousness, as he dissects the insidious alliance of identity politics, publicity culture, and imperial fantasy—even while he reminds us of the forgotten strengths of our own political tradition. This is a book to treasure for its prose as well as for the power of its insights."—Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation

"If multiculturalism were to shed its aspirations to mere correctness, if it were to get an elaboration that kept faith with the liberal vitalities of individual conscience and fulfillment, it would need to give moral imagination a more central role. That is the integration that David Bromwich seeks to attain in these essays as he shrewdly and eloquently gazes upon the past and present of American politics, the speeches and actions of figures ranging from Burke through Lincoln to King and Gandhi, and the prose and poetry of Wordsworth and Dickinson, Woolf and Whitman, and Emerson and Thoreau. Politics is made a loftier subject by such a humane literary scrutiny, even as literature is made more deeply central to our thinking lives."—Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University

"David Bromwich is one of the most incisive writers in America today. In his rapid, straightforward, and convincing style, he has written an intellectually powerful and morally compelling book, one that is not only urgently needed in the current climate but also has permanent value."—Edward Mendelson, author of The Things That Matter

"For several decades, David Bromwich has stood out among American critics as one of the most daring and knowledgeable challengers of received opinion and orthodoxies. This fresh and timely selection of essays effectively conveys the values which inform Bromwich's provocative cultural and political criticism, and will introduce his bold and cogent moral imagination to a wide readership."—Margery Sabin, Wellesley College

Editorial Reviews

Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, Pen American Center

One of The Times Higher Education Supplement’s Books of the Year 2014, chosen by Jane Shaw

"A historically informed examination of moral imagination and human sympathy, as seen through the lives of such figures as Edmund Burke, Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."—-Sewell Chan, New York Times

"[T]hey shed much light on the frame of mind in which Bromwich approached the ambiguous figure of Burke in his biography, and even more on how Bromwich is relevant to the politics of our own times. . . . Those who read these essays alongside Bromwich's account of Burke's intellectual and political career will find their eye caught by three topics, all with Burkean overtones, deeply relevant to the present, and handled with Bromwich's characteristic sharpness. . . . Bromwich is particularly sharp on the way government spokesmen wrap the realities of massacre, torture, and gratuitous cruelty in euphemism. . . . The central essays of Bromwich's book are more meditative, and none the worse for it. . . . The final chapter, 'Comments on Perpetual War,' displays Bromwich's skills as a critic in the tradition of Hazlitt and Orwell."—-Alan Ryan, New York Review of Books

"[A] rich and memorable book. . . . Bromwich appears here in his well-established role as a public intellectual, as civilized as he is trenchant, observing with a mixture of dark wit and moral exasperation diverse aspects of the contemporary American scene. He has a good essay, both horrifying and funny, on the destruction of privacy in the modern United States; a remarkable essay on the psychopathology of political ambition; a fine piece questioning 'cultural identity' as a liberal shibboleth."—-Seamus Perry, Times Literary Supplement

"Moral Imagination brings together a dozen pieces published over the past twenty years in which [Bromwich] mostly explores the minds of people he admires. There is a particularly fine discussion of Lincoln and the constitutional necessity of the Civil War. There are also spirited attacks on the culture of celebrity and on the chicanery of Dick Cheney, which will have most readers whooping."—-Ferdinand Mount, London Review of Books

From the Publisher

"In this collection of essays, Bromwich eschews identity politics and multiculturalism from a 'left' perspective, preferring instead the concept he articulates with the book's title: 'moral imagination.'. . . These essays are demanding but well worth the effort."

Choice

"Bibliophiles, scholars and concerned citizens—all will find provocation and enlightenment here."

Kirkus Reviews

2014-01-23
A collection of (mostly) recent essays that range in focus from moral philosophy to American history to book reviews to op-ed. New York Review of Books contributor Bromwich (English/Yale Univ.; Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry, 2001, etc.) begins with some scholarly essays addressed to a scholarly audience, but in his final section, he offers a collection of pieces—liberal in politics (anti–Bush/Cheney, anti-war, pro–Edward Snowden)—aimed at more general readers. Some heroes emerge in the early essays, among them Abraham Lincoln ("Hatred of violence and love of liberty are clues to Lincoln's political character"), Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. The author argues that a moral person must have imagination, especially to see the needs of strangers as clearly as the needs of friends. One particularly strong piece ("The American Psychosis," 2002) views Emerson as a "moral psychologist" and has kind and erudite words for Henry James' "The Jolly Corner" and Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Bromwich follows that with a sharp piece about Americans' obsession with celebrity and finds useful illustrations in the work of James, Nathanael West, Franz Kafka and others. In another piece, he chides Americans for self-delusion (we fail to see our own violence, imperialism and hypocrisy). In a review of Terry Eagleton's Holy Terror (2005), Bromwich notes that terrorism and war are on the same continuum and observes, "Man is a self-justifying animal." The final pieces blast the war in Iraq, the privatization of the military (Blackwater, etc.), the writing of William Safire, the government's employment of euphemism and the disappointing failure of Barack Obama to control the excesses of the National Security Agency. The author sees Snowden as a hero of sorts, manifestly not a traitor. Bibliophiles, scholars and concerned citizens—all will find provocation and enlightenment here.

Kirkus Reviews