quinta-feira, dezembro 23, 2004
The Roads to Modernity
Uma excelente crítica ao último livro de Gertrude Himmelfarb no Chicago Boyz.
One of the heroes of Gertrude Himmelfarb?s The Roads to Modernity is Adam Smith, saluted every day on our masthead. This book?s design (not a surprising one for a Victorian scholar) is to honor the British Enlightenment; to do this, she splits it in thirds. She devotes the first 150 pages to the British ("The Sociology of Virtue" and then examines more briefly the French ("The Ideology of Reason") and, finally, the American ("The Politics of Liberty"). The book is short and lucid. Her approach uses the French as foil to the English; the Americans not only offer a third and often later perspective but give life to many of the arguments from these eighteenth century British thinkers. Needless to say, she doesn't see that as a bad thing. She argues, toward the end, that "If America is now exceptional, it is because it has inherited and preserved aspects of the British Enlightenment that the British themselves have disarded and that other countries (France, most notably) have never adopted."
posted by Miguel Noronha 4:11 da tarde
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