Description
David Bromwich is a cultural commentator who frequently contributes to The Huffington Post, The New Republic, and other liberal magazines. This book of his collected essays focuses on morality in politics. He argues that moral imagination is the necessary ability to judge right and wrong separately from the question of whether one, or one's group, benefits personally. A historian, Bromwich looks not only at contemporary situations but historical ones, such as Edmund Burke and Richard Price's attempt to figure out what patriotism meant during the French Revolution, and Abraham Lincoln's approach to the issue of slavery in the US. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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Compelling essays from one of today's most esteemed cultural criticsSpanning 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.
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