Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform / Edition 1

by Leslie Butler

Overview

In this 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807857922
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	04/30/2007
Edition description:	1
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.89(d)

About the Author

Leslie Butler is assistant professor of history at Dartmouth College.

Table of Contents

Preface     xi
Introduction     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
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
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
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
ThereIs No Country Where Genuine Criticism...Is More Needed     165
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
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
Epilogue     262
Notes     269
Bibliography     325
Index     361

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

In this important contribution to transatlantic intellectual and cultural history, Leslie Butler skillfully resurrects the ideas of cultivation and cosmopolitanism advanced by Victorian critics long neglected or misunderstood. Joining a chorus of distinguished historians including Daniel Walker Howe, James Turner, and Jonathan Hansen, she demonstrates that these unfairly maligned partisans of liberal democracy battled against slavery and racism, championed women's rights, and opposed political corruption and imperialism not because they distrusted 'the people' but because they wanted their nation to redeem the promise of popular government.—James T. Kloppenberg, author of The Virtues of Liberalism

Editorial Reviews

A remarkable work that recovers a lost generation of American intellectuals.—New England Quarterly



A fine, well-researched, and provocative work.—Journal of American History



A fascinating transatlantic intellectual and biographical history. The book enhances understanding of the pivotal role of public intellectuals in the formation of a transatlantic liberalism in the long nineteenth century.—Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

From the Publisher