Asking why many American intellectuals have had such difficulty accepting wholeheartedly the cultural dimensions of democracy, Robert Dawidoff examines their alienation and ambivalence, a tradition of detachment he identifies as "Tocquevillian." In the work of three towering American literary figures - Henry Adams, Henry James, and George Santayana -- Dawidoff explores fully this distancing and uneasy response to democratic culture.
Linked together by common Harvard, Cambridge, and New England connections, and by an upper-class, Brahmin background, each of these three writers, Dawidoff argues, was at once self-critical and contemptuous of cultural democracy -- especially its indifference to them and what they represented. But their claims to detached observation of democratic culture must be viewed skeptically, Dawidoff warns, and borrowed with caution.
An important contribution of the book is its integration of gay issues into American intellectual history. Viewing James's and Santayana's attitudes toward their homosexuality as affecting their views of American society, Dawidoff examines this significant and overlooked element in the American intellectual and cultural mix. Dawidoff also includes powerful new readings of Adams's "Democracy" and James's "The Ambassadors" and discusses Santayana's Americanist essays.
In his foreward, Alan Trachtenberg notes the "taboo" that seems to have fallen over the word "democracy." "It is rarely encountered anymore in humanistic studies," he says, " snubbed in favor of gender, class, race, region." This trend, he says, may be in part due to an unease about "studying" the culture in which we participate because the posture of the cutural critic implies a certain detachment. ""The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage" returns the question of democracy to centerstage," he concludes, "not as political theory alone but as cultural and personal experience."
Originally published in 1992.
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George Santayana probably did more than anyone except Alexis de Tocqueville to shape the critical view of American culture. The great philosopher and writer coined the phrase "genteel tradition," introducing it to a California audience in 1911. The phrase caught fire, giving a name to the culture of the republic. Santayana's address appears in this collection of influential essays about the country he lived in from 1872 to 1912. Because he remained European in spirit, the Spaniard brought a sharp detachment to his observations. He points out the American split between thought and action, theory and practice, the traditional and the modern, the arts and business, the high-brow and the popular. He also examines the excessive moralism in national life, which baffles Europeans. These nine essays touch on American idealism and materialism and American endeavor, sacred and profane. Also the editor of Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book, Douglas L. Wilson is Lawrence Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Knox College. Robert Dawidoff, a professor of history at Claremont Graduate School, is the author of The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, and Santayana.