Overview

In this intellectual history of American liberalism during the second half of the nineteenth century, Leslie Butler examines a group of nationally prominent and internationally oriented writers who sustained an American tradition of self-consciously progressive and cosmopolitan reform. She addresses how these men established a critical perspective on American racism, materialism, and jingoism in the decades between the 1850s and the 1890s while she recaptures their insistence on the ability of ordinary citizens to work toward their limitless potential as intelligent and moral human beings. At the core of Butler's study are the writers George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, a quartet of friends who would together define the humane liberalism of America's late Victorian middle class. In creative engagement with such British intellectuals as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, John Ruskin, James Bryce, and Goldwin Smith, these critical Americans articulated political ideals and cultural standards to suit the burgeoning mass democracy the Civil War had created. This transatlantic framework informed their notions of educative citizenship, print-based democratic politics, critically informed cultural dissemination, and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy. Butler argues that a careful reexamination of these strands of late nineteenth-century liberalism can help enrich a revitalized liberal tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century.

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9781469606125

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In this beautifully written and fair-minded book, Leslie Butler overturns a century of debunking to recover, in the liberals of the Victorian era, experience instructive for America today. She demonstrates the continued vitality of her subjects' reflections on democracy, race, and the role of the media, on party politics, overseas interventions, and, not least, the social responsibility of the arts. --Daniel Walker Howe, author of Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln In this important contribution to transatlantic intellectual and cultural history, Leslie Butler skillfully resurrects the ideas of cultivation and cosmopolitanism advanced by Victorian critics long neglected or misunderstood. Joining a chorus of distinguished historians including Daniel Walker Howe, James Turner, and Jonathan Hansen, she demonstrates that these unfairly maligned partisans of liberal democracy battled against slavery and racism, championed women's rights, and opposed political corruption and imperialism not because they distrusted 'the people' but because they wanted their nation to redeem the promise of popular government. --James T. Kloppenberg, author of The Virtues of Liberalism

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