Living Ideas in America

New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1951. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good. xviii, 766 pages. Some front board weakness noted. Some cover wear and soiling. Includes Preface; Part One: The American Setting (with chapters on The People, and The Land); Part Two: Principles, Traditions, and Institutions, (with chapters on Fundamentals of the American Political System), The Machinery of Government, Democracy, or Majority Rule and Minority Right; State and Nation; The Welfare State and Rugged Individualism; Liberty and Order; The Tradition of Change and Reform; Church and State; School and Society; Part Three: America as a World Power: Peace and War, Isolation, Intervention and World Power. Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) was an American historian. As one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time, with 40 books and 700 essays and reviews, he helped define modern liberalism in the United States. In the 1940s and 1950s, Commager was noted for his campaigns against McCarthyism and other abuses of government power. He opposed the Vietnam War and was an outspoken critic of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan and what he viewed as their abuses of presidential power. His principal scholarly works were his 1936 biography of Theodore Parker; his intellectual history The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (1950), which focuses on the evolution of liberalism in the American political mind from the 1880s to the 1940s, and his intellectual history Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977). A compilation of writings that illuminate the social and political ideas of American thought. This book is directed to that growing body of men and women who are concerned about the complex problems that confront our society today and that, so often, seem strange and baffling. It is designed to make clear the historical setting of those problems and our long historical experience with them, in the firm belief that an understanding of the background will illuminate the foreground, and that knowledge of the past will guide in the future. Derived from a Kirkus review: Important reading in these days in which our concept of Americanism is undergoing some rational and irrational bruiting about, in this fine anthology complied with commentary by the noted historian, critic and commentator. Selections from Americans past and present -- professional essayists, journalists, novelists; statesmen and Presidents; official documents and Congressional debates -- are grouped to serve as a primer in American ideals and methods of solving problems, dealing with the new and adapting the old. Part I examines the people, their character and variety, and the land itself; Part II -- the most voluminous section -- treats American principles, traditions and institutions -- the fundamentals of our political system; the machinery of government; the concept of democracy; the relation between state and nation; the debate concerning the ""welfare state""; liberty and order; change and reform; the relation between church and state; schools and society: Part III includes views on America's role in peace and war, as a world power. In addition to inclusions from Mr. Commager's own writings there is a well-balanced group of selections -- from Bradford to Lilienthal, de Crevecoeur to Benet, Mark Twain, Webster, Lincoln, F.D.R., Mencken, etc. Throughout the emphasis is placed on vitality of idea as well as an implied organic definition of Americanism to which a free and healthy scepticism, freedom of expression and intelligent protest are essential. Anthology plus American market.