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What Lincoln Believed - The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President (Paperback, 1st Anchor Books ed)
Loot Price: R324
Discovery Miles 3 240
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What Lincoln Believed - The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President (Paperback, 1st Anchor Books ed)
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List price R429
Loot Price R324
Discovery Miles 3 240
You Save R105 (24%)
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Few biographers and historians have taken Lincoln's ideas seriously
or placed him in the context of major intellectual traditions. In
"What Lincoln Believed, the most comprehensive study ever written
of the thought of America's most revered president, Michael Lind
provides a resource to the public philosophy that guided Lincoln as
a statesman and shaped the United States.
Although he is often presented as an idealist dedicated to
political abstractions, Lincoln was a pragmatic politician with a
lifelong interest in science, technology, and economics. Throughout
his career he was a disciple of the Kentucky senator Henry Clay,
whose "American System" of government support for industrial
capitalism Lincoln promoted when he served in the Illinois
statehouse, the U.S. Congress, and the White House.
Today Lincoln is remembered for his opposition to slavery and his
leadership in guiding the Union to victory in the Civil War. But
Lincoln's thinking about these subjects is widely misunderstood.
His deep opposition to slavery was rooted in his allegiance to the
ideals of the American Revolution. Only late in his life, however,
did Lincoln abandon his support for the policy of "colonizing"
black Americans abroad, which he derived from Henry Clay and Thomas
Jefferson. Lincoln and most of his fellow Republicans opposed the
extension of slavery outside of the South because they wanted an
all-white West, not a racially integrated society.
Although the Great Emancipator was not the Great Integrationist, he
was the Great Democrat. In an age in which many argued that only
whites were capable of republican government, Lincoln insisted on
the universality of human rights and the potential fordemocracy
everywhere. In a century in which liberal and democratic
revolutions against monarchy and dictatorship in Europe and Latin
America repeatedly had failed, Lincoln believed that liberal
democracy as a form of government was on trial in the American
Civil War. "Our popular government has often been called an
experiment," Lincoln told the U.S. Congress, insisting that the
American people had to prove to the world that "when ballots have
fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful
appeal, back to bullets." If the United States fell apart after the
losers in an election took up arms, then people everywhere might
conclude that democracy inevitably led to anarchy and "government
of the people, by the people, for the people" might well "perish
from the earth."
"He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but
mostly because it was a free country." What Lincoln said of Henry
Clay could be said of him as well. In "What Lincoln Believed,
Michael Lind shows the enduring relevance of Lincoln's vision of
the United States as a model of liberty and democracy for the
world.
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