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The South as America
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12193 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1987 |
5,827 Words |
| Author
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Donald W. Livingston
Donald W. Livingston is associate professor of philosophy at
Emory University. He is the author of Hume's Philosophy of
Common Life and is working on a book-length study of the
nature of Hume's conservative political philosophy. |
ALTERNATIVE AMERICAS
A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture
Anne Norton
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986
363 pp.
Anne Norton has written an original and profound study of the meaning and development of American national identity. Her subject is American political culture from 1815-1865, the period after the War of 1812 when the fledgling republic, having ended its last battle with England, began fighting with itself. What was the fight about, and is it over? Norton poses the former question but not the latter, yet she has written a book that prompts us to ask it. The question about what it means to be an American is still with us, and a necessary step to any humane and meaningful answer is to have worked through the minds of those Americans who loosed, and those who were cut down by, the fateful lightning of the "terrible swift sword."
Liberal, Progressive Barriers to Historical Understanding
We must try to put ourselves back in time to see how different concepts of American political culture were instantiated in the sectional conflict between the North and South. But it is difficult to carry out this act of historical reenactment for two reasons. First, owing to the prevailing liberal ideology, which has captured the main posts in the state and in literature, we are inclined to what Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history, by which a present state of affairs is read into the past. This produces the illusion
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