Customer Reviews

Liberalism and Its Discontents

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

These 17 essays are wonderful when read individually. All are elouqent and insightful (as you would expect from Brinkley), especially the biographical ones such as "The Passions of Oral Roberts", "Robert Penn Warren, T. Harry Williams, and Huey Long," and "The Rise of Franklin Roosevelt." "Icons of the American Establishment" features a wonderful biography of Henry Stimson and readers will enjoy the chapters about Allard Lowenstein and Richard Hofstader.

Nonetheless, readers should be aware that most of this material is not new, as Brinkley explicity states in the introduction. Most of these essays have been published before in one form or another

The editorial reviews published by Amazon just about tell it all. Highly recommended as valuable (and timeless) insights into who we are collectively (USA) and how we got here. These essays combine big-picture themes with how those themes were engaged by real people.
I am reluctant to single out one essay, but will do so anyway: The Problem of American Conservativism. Brinkley goes far beyond the familiar rhetoric of and about this "conservatism," and gave me a better, more balanced understanding. There are deeper issues here than simply left vs right, unsophisticated vs cosmopolitans, etc.
This one (of the very few) books that I did not resell at the used-book store.

This book is well written, compelling, and has plenty of insights for those hoping to understand the political history of liberalism in America since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, it does not follow any unifying narrative, but rather, as a collection of essays, jumps from topic to topic in a somewhat disjointed manner. This left me unsatisfied. Each essay in itself was interesting, but I did not come away from this book with any sense of the greater picture. For example, the final chapter of the book is a critique of historians and their work that is more appropriate to an introductory college history class than a book about "Liberalism and Its Discontents." The bottom line: check out some of the essays in this book that interest you, but don't be fooled by its title.

Tracing the archaeology of liberalism the tale of its discontents is the autobiography of the primordial lockean and his pilgrim's progress since Roosevelt onwards. Like deviations around the mean, the grumblers and near party linears receive a series of shaggy dog stories for their spicy 'deviations'. I went to library looking for Ruggiero's History of Liberalism but came home with this instead, more fun. Lately, the number of shaggy dogs is increasing exponentially given the Bush regime and the discontents could mutate into malcontents. Meanwhile liberalism lumbers ever onward, an ism that has taken more torpedoes than most, yet without sinking.