Though repetitive and sometimes vague, Viroli’s examination of political ideals should be of great interest to students of...
A meditation on the form of government best suited to accommodate—but by no means depend on—the active participation of citizens.
A native of Italy and close student of Renaissance politics, Viroli (Political Science/Princeton Univ.; Niccolò’s Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli, 2000) apparently conceived this volume in a fit of righteous pique after the election of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a communications magnate who “concentrates in his hands a personal power that no democratic leader before him has ever enjoyed.” To Viroli’s mind, Berlusconi’s rise signals a collapse of civic virtues among his compatriots, and this discourse on republicanism—a form of government perfected, if not invented, in Italy—is intended to tweak civic consciousness on his native ground. Its relevance to American readers, used to a low level of individual political involvement before mid-September 2001, extends even to the most apolitical or apathetic, whom Viroli’s elusive definition of republicanism assures that their involvement in government isn’t really necessary, since “it is often more important to have good rulers than to have citizens participate in every decision. What counts is that those who govern and decide wish to serve the common good.” Classical republicanism, he notes, promotes a blend of governmental forms, including monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, in order to serve the public good. Its liberal, democratic, and conservative variants differ chiefly in their conception of individual liberty. In Viroli’s view, republicanism “sustains a complex theory of political liberty that incorporates both the liberal and the democratic requirement” but insists that liberty requires the absence of impediment and domination. Without a return to republican virtues, he insists, “we shall have to resign ourselves to living in nations whose governments are controlled by the cunning and the arrogant.”
Though repetitive and sometimes vague, Viroli’s examination of political ideals should be of great interest to students of civics and practical philosophy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8090-8077-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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