Daniel J. Mahoney. The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation. New York: Encounter, 2022. Pp. 232. $30.99 (cloth).
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln stand as major figures in numerous studies and selfunderstandings of American politics and American history.Both figure as the subjects of the central chapters of Daniel J. Mahoney's The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation, a work which situates itself in relation to "the culture of repudiation" (xi; 137; 217; 221) increasingly prevalent in America and beyond its shores.The decision of the San Francisco Board of Education in January 2021 to rename (or de-name) Abraham Lincoln High School and George Washington High School, among other public schools, instantiates the proximate challenge to which Mahoney's volume is a direct response."George Washington sacrificed a great deal to help establish a regime of liberty, and he subordinated narrow personal ambition to an austere sense of public duty and reputation well earned," Mahoney contends (109)."But in the emerging dispensation that is replacing our old constitutional order, the fact that he owned slaves must negate everything else, come what may" (109).
Author: Zeitlin, Samuel Garrett
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7036824544
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