Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThis well-wrought, well-researched book tackles one of the major academic battles of our times, the culture wars. . . . It endorses a tradition going back to Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold. It denounces, or at least criticizes, 'contemporary cultural leftists' such as Richard Rorty, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and Stanley Fish--all of whom agree that the past is not a corrective to the present but a source of error. The error, Seaton argues, is theirs. . . . Seaton's book . . . argues well for that 'sense of wonder' which is, by anyone's measurement, our priceless heritage and hope."
--Roanoke Times & World News
"This wonderful book defends a tradition of American cultural self-criticism that includes Irving Babbitt, H. L. Mencken, Dwight McDonald, the Trillings, Edmund Wilson, and Ralph Ellison from famous and formidable contemporary opponents. Seaton takes on Richard Rorty's pragmatism, the cultural radicalism of Leslie Fielder and Susan Sontag, the trendy academic cultural studies movement of Frederic Jameson, Edward Said, and Stanley Fish, and the cultural conservatism of E. D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom. . . . This book, above all, is a criticism of the pretensions of American romantic idealism, the desire to liberate the self from all constraints for its natural innocence. Because such liberation is really impossible, all that disappears is what is required for genuine self-scrutiny and self-restraint. The pursuit of the innocent self produces the imperial self and the deranged self. . . . Seaton is a most reasonable, sensible, courageous, instructive, and witty liberal, and we should count him among our most helpful friends."
--University Bookman
