The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America: Main Currents in American ThoughtVernon Parrington Routledge, 29. 9. 2017 - 484 strán (strany) This final volume of Vernon Louis Parrington's Pultzer Prize-winning study deals with the decay of romantic optimism. It shows that the cause of decay is attributed to three sources: stratifying of economics under the pressure of centralization; the rise of mechanistic science; and the emergence of a spirit of skepticism which, with teachings of the sciences and lessons of intellectuals, has resulted in the questioning of democratic ideals. Parrington presents the movement of liberalism from 1913 to 1917, and the reaction to it following World War I. He notes that liberals announced that democratic hopes had not been fulfilled; the Constitution was not a democratic instrument nor was it intended to be; and while Americans had professed to create a democracy, they had in fact created a plutocracy. Industrialization of America under the leadership of the middle class and the rise of critical attitudes towards the ideals and handiwork of that class are examined in great detail. Parrington's interpretation of the literature during this time focuses on four divisions of development: the conquest of America by the middle class; the challenge of that overlordship by democratic agrarianism; the intellectual revolution brought about by science and the appropriation of science by the middle class; and the rise of detached criticism by younger intellectuals. A new introduction by Bruce Brown highlights Parrington's life and explains the importance of this volume. |
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... earlier days, at a tactical disadvantage, and already a minority economic group, were fated to lose their last great uprising. Also out of the valley of the Mississippi came a literature of the Middle Border. Such writers as Edward ...
... earlier days had not been fulfilled, that the Constitution is not a democratic instrument nor was it intended to be, and that while Americans were professing to create a democracy, they had been creating in fact a plutocracy. They then ...
... earlier days, a thing to be respected. For all his modernity and disillusion learned from Pullman-car philosophers, Sinclair Lewis is still an echo of Jean Jacques and the golden hopes of the Enlightenment—thin and far-off*, no doubt ...
... earlier democratic program. The finer spirit of the Enlightenment was lost, and in consequence the major parties chose to follow the economic interests of master groups, heedless of all humanitarian issues. * The Introduction, aswill ...
Main Currents in American Thought Vernon Parrington. But the spirit awakened by the earlier democratic enthusiasm could not be kept in political strait-jackets. The Jacksonian revolution overflowed all narrow party dikes, expressing ...