Explores leadership and civic virtue in American culture.
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From the Back Cover
Extreme Virtue presents a new and radical approach to the problems of leadership and virtue in public life. Originating in the author's newspaper writing about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, the book grapples with what has gone wrong in the American political system and describes what we should look for in our leaders. Sartwell argues that the real problem is a pervasive lack of truth in political leaders and that more can be accomplished by straight talk than by polling and focus groups. The book consists of biographical portraits of five great Americans: anarchists Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre, conservative senator Barry Goldwater, Lakota spiritual leader John Fire Lame Deer, and black nationalist Malcolm X. The author argues that what makes these figures distinctively American is that each shares a suspicion of power and a vision of individual liberation. Despite their distinctive and unique approaches, each person is a model of truth in public life.
About the Author
Crispin Sartwell is Chair of Humanities and Sciences at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the author of several books, including most recently End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History, also published by SUNY Press. His political writing appears in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Harper's, among other outlets. He also writes a syndicated weekly opinion column.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
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This review is from: Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives (Paperback)
In a little book that deserves more attention than it's received--especially at a time when we gear up for the national ritual of electing a president--Crispin Sartwell explores the meaning of public virtue.
Sartwell is a philosopher who clearly knows his stuff. But (thankfully) he declines to write a conventional ethical treatise, opting instead to focus on five individuals he believes exemplify virtuous leadership. This decision is based on his claim that our ethical positions are generated not by abstract reasoning (although it certainly has a role to play) so much as observation of the lives of those we admire and reflection on why we admire them. Moral intuitions and behavior, in other words, are generated largely from reflective observation and emulation. So one way of getting a handle on public virtue is reflectively observing those who practice it. For Sartwell, the anarchists Emma Goldman and (the less famous but brilliant) Voltairine de Cleyre,* conservative leader Barry Goldwater, Lakota holy man Lame Deer, and activist Malcolm X together exemplify public virtues most worthy of emulating. Goldman displays a passionate, empathic commitment to justice that transcends personal ambition; de Cleyre displays self-reflection, a self-knowledge that protects commitment from becoming fanaticism because it encourages humility and humor; Goldwater displays integrity in his honesty, his refusal to compartmentalize himself into self and persona (Sartwell thinks hypocrisy is the central temptation of public figures); Lame Deer displays connectedness in his ability to feel kinship with all people and with nature (a wonderful tonic against egoism); and Malcolm X is the sum of all these virtues, which for Sartwell constitutes living in the truth (for in this context, truth is more an existential than a propositional affair). In exploring these five figures, Sartwell argues, correctly I think, that character comes whole. The very qualities that can exemplify themselves as admirable (and hence virtuous) may be inextricably connected to darker ones. Goldman's passionate commitment to justice, for example, led her to espouse violence. It's no good, claims Sartwell, wishing that she'd held a different opinion about violence, because it was inseparable from her commitment to justice. Goldwater seems the odd man out in the line-up. But as Sartwell points out, his selection of leaders is based more on how they believe than what they believe. He admits that there are obvious limits to this rule, and the four public virtues he defends here are checks against having to designate straightforward advocates of (for example) genocide as publicly virtuous. But I think it's fair to say that Sartwell's position comes close to a sort of Kierkegaardian "truth as subjectivity" which raises as many problems as it solves. At the end of the day, Extreme Virtue defends a pretty traditional, common sense thesis: that public leadership ought to based on openness, honesty, reflection, and authentic commitment. It says something about the current state of politics in this country that such things actually need to be said, and that when they are, they are provocative. A really quite good book. Four-and-a-half stars. ___________ * The chapter on de Cleyre is more or less reprinted in Sartwell's Exquisite Rebel, a collection of de Cleyre's writings. Also highly recommended.
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