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Article: The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism.
- Article from:
- American Scholar
- Article date:
- January 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Society. 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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By J. David Greenstone. Princeton University Press. $24. 95. Paper, $13.95. Reviewed by Charles L. Griswold, Jr.
The American Founding was to an extraordinary extent the undertaking of classically educated and philosophically informed statesmen. They worked against the background of a long history of debates about the centrality of virtue to political life, about the problem of reconciling the individual's pursuit of self-perfection and the community's pursuit of more mundane goods, and generally about the paradoxes involved in pursuing a political ideal in a world known to be irremediably imperfect. When Madison wrote in the 49th Federalist that "a nation of ...