Writing Politics

(Paperback)

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An original anthology exploring the tradition of the political essay-including works by Hannah Arendt, Martin Luther King Jr., Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Mary McCarthy-edited by the brilliant David Bromwich. David Bromwich is one of the most well-informed, cogent, and morally uncompromising political writers on the left today. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics and the author of a magisterial intellectual biography of Edmund Burke. In Writing Politics, Bromwich presents twenty-seven essays by different writers from the beginning of the modern political world in the seventeenth century until recent times, essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history-revolution and war, racism, women's rights, the status of the worker, the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence and non-violence, among them-and essays that have also been chosen as superlative examples of the power of written English to reshape our thoughts and the world. Jonathan Swift, Burke, Thoreau, Lincoln, George Eliot, Harriet Taylor, W.E.B DuBois, Gandhi, George Orwell, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt are here, among others, together with a wide-ranging introduction in which Bromwich considers the character and significance of political argument and the true power of eloquence.

Reviews

Penetrating essays across three centuries consider freedom, power, and justice. . . . Overall, the sophistication of language and argument throughout this anthology testifies to what public discourse used to sound like before it became dominated by Twitter rants. Well-chosen, enduringly relevant selections. Kirkus Reviews

David Bromwich has chosen essays in which famed dissenters, critics, and reformers courageously address their fellow citizens, reframing a shared world and its political demands. They offer an unparalleled education in how to think and act politically. Karuna Mantena

David Bromwichone of the few great public intellectuals in our timehas given us a feast of wise and courageous essays by exemplary writers of the highest order! His elegant and eloquent introduction sets the stage for a caravan of profound reflections so timely for our historical moment of escalating moral decay, political corruption and massive arbitrary power. Cornel West

Author Bio

David Bromwich is the Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of several books, most recently, Moral Imagination- Essays and American Breakdown- The Trump Years and How They Befell Us. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.