Reviews for The Social & political ideas of some representative thinkers of the Victorian age

The average rating for The Social & political ideas of some representative thinkers of the Victorian age based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-08-01 00:00:00 Brian J. Lozoskie Typically, I am a pretty great reader. I finish books quickly. But if book-reading-records were “broken”, this book did it for me. It took me three weeks to read this whole book. Now, I have to add that that is at a ploddy speed. I didn't read for hours each day, and sometimes I didn't read at all. Shocking, I know. But for me, even at that speed, three weeks was about two weeks too long. It frustrated me. I needed to know why. I came up with three potential reasons for why I couldn't seem to read this book any faster: the amazing amount of content squeezed into 500 pages, my ability to concentrate, and the author's sometimes quirky writing style. This book contained pretty much all of the history of the world to about the year 1800 that effected the founding of the United States. That's a whole lot of information. Scholars can study it for lifetimes and still not get it all. And we're not just talking facts, we're talking movements and theories. The information this book contains is a summary of all the Great Books combined, and more. It is an overwhelming amount of knowledge, and I am somewhat appalled that the author thought he could shove it all into just under 500 pages. It was hard to get through the information because every other sentence was brand new material. You had to pay such close attention to every sentence, every word, every thought. It was the task of a year, not three weeks. Because the book contained so many in-depth ideas, and because the ideas shifted so rapidly, I found that my attention had to be 110%. I couldn't let my mind wander in the least, lest I lose the train of thought. My poor little ADD brain doesn't really like concentrating that hard, and this book was a strain on my intellectual capacity. I found myself frequently distracted, and having to re-read a section. Worse, I was mostly trying to read in 5-10 minute increments while my kids were distracted. That's how often they generally need my attention lately. So every 5 or 10 minutes, I would have to put my book down, drag my brain out of the world of ideas, and explain why the sky is blue or what nuclear generators are made of. It wasn't fun, and it definitely wasn't conducive to my reading. Finally, at the advice of a friend, I sat down after the kids were in bed one night and found I could actually read giant amounts without distraction. Thanks, Carol, it worked. The most perplexing reason I found it difficult to really get into the book was the author's occasional forays into a different style of writing. First of all, the author did an amazing job covering such a vast amount of information. Who is this man, that he could understand and then relay that much?!? Wow. But the trouble came when he would randomly break from the “so and so said this, that person believed this” style, and started speaking without reference to someone else's ideas. Whole paragraphs were presented as if it was absolute truth, or at least for the author. This disconcerting tactic left me searching back through the pages to discover who the ideas should be attributed to and what exactly was going on. Did the author forget to tell us who said this? I doubt it. Was the author trying to tell me what I should believe at this moment? It wasn't characteristic. I especially noticed this during the sections on Christianity and Hume. I think it is possible that these were the author's two main points, and he changed the style to make them more obvious. Whatever he meant by this, it ruined my concentration, and made reading the book even more difficult. One more interesting thing I noticed at the very end of the book. The book is titled, The Roots of American Order. Throughout the book, the “order” was referred to as “the path we follow, or the pattern by which we live with purpose and meaning.” That's great. The book had an amazing point that I never would have thought of. The author is a genius to have found this pattern running through all known history and to relate it to America. But suddenly, six and a quarter pages from the end, the author says, “The American order, far from being stagnant, still is developing [so far so good, right?]. This word “order” implies membership; an order is something that one belongs to. All American citizens are born into this American order, or else formally naturalized into it.” And so on and so forth for the rest of the book. Suddenly, the author is throwing a completely new form for how we should be assimilating this information, just pages from the end. What am I supposed to do with this? Reread the entire book? I don't think so. Yes, it gives us a delightful new way to look at all he's taught us, but after three grueling weeks, the last thing I want to do is begin over again. So much for order.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-27 00:00:00 Martin Hanson Great overview and explanation of the development of Western political thought and civilization. Kirk is masterful in weaving together long arguments and traditions into a simple narrative. However, Russell Kirk baulks on the veracity of the Old Testament: "The 'historical Moses' may have been different from the Moses of Exodus, modern scholarship may suggest...(T)here exist two distinct forms of history: sacred history, and secular history. Sacred history consists of an account of mankind's experience with God; secular history consists of an account of mankind's experience in mundane affairs. The first form of history often can be expressed only through imagery - through parables, allegories, and the 'high dream' of poetry. The second form of history, dealing with worldly events, tries to confine itself to such verifiable records and narrations as are available... "Therefore the Old Testament, a sacred history, ought not to be read as if it were simply an account of everyday events. Often it is symbolic and poetical, for many truths are most accurately expressed in symbol. The story of Jonah, for instance, really is a kind of parable: it teaches how a people, through their religious faith, may preserve their identity even though conquered and enslaved by some immense power - as if a man were to be swallowed by a sea monster. Just so the Jews, through their faith in Jehovah, survived their Babylonian Captivity. "Similarly, it is not a conceivable 'historical Moses' - unknown to us, because no documents or even artifacts or bones survive from that remote time and that obscure people - who really matters. The important Moses is the figure portrayed by the scribes - the man who experienced a 'leap in being,' who was granted moments of transcendence perhaps comparable to Pascal's, who through that experience was enabled to describe the Law for the Hebrews. One might as well search for 'the historical Don Quixote de la Mancha.' Even if somehow it could be shown that Cervantes had in mind a particular Spaniard of his acquaintance whom he used as a model for his immortal character, it would not be the 'historical' Quixote who would matter to the twentieth century: the significant Quixote is the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance of Cervantes' novel. As Mark Twain said of Homer, the Iliad was written either by Homer of by another man with the same name. So it is with Moses and the Law. "Although a good deal of secular history is intermingled with the sacred history of the Bible, the Old Testament's purpose is not to present a chronicle of political and military events, but rather to describe in a variety of ways, and by various hands, how the Hebrews were made aware of the existence of Jehovah, and of Jehovah's laws, and of the Covenant that joins God and man. To criticize the Old Testament as if it were an attempt at chronological recording in the modern sense is to mistake its whole character." — Roots of American Order, pages 38-41