The genteel tradition and the sacred rage Book

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 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. "[Democracy]…is rarely encountered anymore in humanistic studies, snubbed in favor of gender, class, race, region…[Dawidoff] returns the question of democracy to centerstage, not as political theory alone but as cultural and personal experience." - Alan Trachtenberg