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Article: Wonder Boy.("Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World")(Book Review)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- May 5, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World, by Jedediah Purdy (Knopf, $24, 352 pp.)
Jedediah Purdy, the American Left's winsome scourge of irony, is a great one for name-dropping. In the course of a three-page preface to this book, he cites Burke, Tocqueville, Shakespeare, and Hannah Arendt; by page 50, he has added Yeats, Whitman, Hamilton, Jefferson, Thoreau, Adam Smith, Oakeshott, the Buddha, Emerson, Montesquieu, and Augustine.
Such a welter of names might lead the reader to suspect that Purdy's book is a work of political philosophy -- and indeed, it sometimes wanders in that direction. It wanders elsewhere, too: through ...