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Moral imagination -- A dissent on cultural identity -- The meaning of patriotism in 1789 -- Lincoln and Whitman as representative Americans -- Lincoln's constitutional necessity -- Shakespeare, Lincoln, and ambition -- The American psychosis -- How publicity makes people real -- The self-deceptions of empire -- What is the West? -- Holy terror and civilized terror -- Comments on perpetual war -- Cheney's law -- Euphemism and violence -- William Safire: wars made out of words -- What 9/11 makes us forget -- The Snowden case "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"--

Machine generated contents note I Early Ambition and the Theory of Society -- II The Sublime and Beautiful -- III The Wilkes Crisis and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents -- IV The American War -- V The Loss of the Empire in the West -- VI Democracy, Representation, and the Gordon Riots -- VII In Defense of Politics. The first biography to attend to the complexity of Burke's thought as it emerges in both his major writings and private correspondence. The public and private writings cannot be easily dissociated, nor should they be. For Burke's "a thinker, writer, and politician." The principles of politics were merely those of morality enlarged. Bromwich reads Burke's career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be. This intellectual biography examines the first three decades of Burke's professional life. His protest against the cruelties of English society and his criticism of all unchecked power laid the groundwork for his later attacks on abuses of government in India, Ireland, and France. Bromwich allows us to see the youthful skeptic, wary of a social contract based on "nature," the theorist of love and fear in relation to "the sublime and beautiful," the advocate of civil liberty, even in the face of civil disorder; the architect of economic reform; and the agitator for peace with America.

The first biography to attend to the complexity of Burke's thought as it emerges in both his major writings and private correspondence. The public and private writings cannot be easily dissociated, nor should they be. For Burke's "a thinker, writer, and politician." The principles of politics were merely those of morality enlarged. Bromwich reads Burke's career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be. This intellectual biography examines the first three decades of Burke's professional life. His protest against the cruelties of English society and his criticism of all unchecked power laid the groundwork for his later attacks on abuses of government in India, Ireland, and France. Bromwich allows us to see the youthful skeptic, wary of a social contract based on "nature," the theorist of love and fear in relation to "the sublime and beautiful," the advocate of civil liberty, even in the face of civil disorder; the architect of economic reform; and the agitator for peace with America.

ABSTRACT: Public trust in the academy has been waning for more than a generation now, and in that time, the public support of academic scholarship has been under an almost constant threat of drastic cuts. As accountability has been bureaucratized inside the university itself, scholarship has also come under the suspicious eye of cost-benefit accounting performed by external agencies. This narrow version of accountability may press so far against autonomy that "tension" seems too weak a word to describe the divergence. Scholarly autonomy, if it means anything, means that the individual scholar, answerable to no judging body higher than his scholarly peers, is able to give the law to himself concerning the nature of the work and how it is to proceed.

Though they appear divergent at first glance, the reactions of Richard Price and Edmund Burke to the French Revolution may not be so different. Ultimately the difference between Burke on one side, and Price and Mary Wollstonecraft on the other, may be traced to the widely different degrees of suspicion with which they approached the idea of equality. Social equality, Burke thought, and the discovery of political rights to support equality were a catastrophic error that could lead to nothing but violence. For Price and Wollstonecraft, democratic equality was a natural effect of our coming to know that inequality, and institutions such as primogeniture that sanctified inequality, were a human invention that produced more misery than happiness. None of these writers was without ambivalence about democracy, but Price and Wollstonecraft were contingent allies of democratic reform and showed it in their own time; while Burke was a resolute opponent of democracy, and did his best to slow down the progress under way in Britain toward a reform of representation in parliament.

In modern academic discussions, patriotism is sometimes presented as a profound requirement of human nature; yet it is admitted that some people are more urgently moved by patriotism than others, and that the feeling is required and not innate. At an outer edge of the consensus, one finds the communitarian idea that patriotism is a proof of our social nature; that people who lack such feeling or decline to display it are thin-blooded in some way, or missing an essential element of gregarious virtue or decency. Writer George Orwell tried to enforce a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. This essay discusses the following works and their theories and analyses of the idea of patriotism: (1) "On the Love of Our Country" by Richard Price (1789); and (2) Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event, in a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentlemen in Paris (1790). Adapted from the source document.

Michael Foot, who died on March 3, 2010, at the age of ninety-six, was the soul of the democratic Left in England. His political engagements started in the late 1930s, with editorials against the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, and lasted well into the second campaign for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. He was in his prime in the decades between the Suez Crisis of 1956, which brought down the Conservative government of Anthony Eden, and the Falklands War of 1982, which sealed the popularity of Margaret Thatcher. The fine obituary by Mervyn Jones in the Guardian was headed, "Principled leader who held Labour together in the early 1980s, and a writer devoted to the cause of freedom." There is not a word of exaggeration there. He was a great spirit and a great voice, in every sense that both of those words will bear.

A eulogy of British Labour Party politician Foot draws on a personal relationship with the man & highlights his political acumen. D. Edelman

The resolution required to get out of an imperial or a humanitarian-improvement occupation is not different in kind
from the heave of the will required for getting in. The problem is that getting in was made possible by a morale of
entitlement that speaks the language of self–sacrifice and decency; this one-way bridge of excuses is still in place
when the moment comes for getting out. If the choice to invade and occupy were actually derived from conscience,
our duties might be revised once the mission was shown to be riddled with atrocities. Yet the occupying power will
always be hampered by the emotion of conviction that drove it to attack in the first place.