Moral Imagination: Essays

by David Bromwich

Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These wide-ranging essays address thinkers and topics from Gandhi and Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, to the dangers of identity politics, to the psychology of the heroes of classic American literature.

Bromwich demonstrates that moral imagination allows us to judge the right and wrong of actions apart from any benefit to ourselves, and he argues that this ability is an innate individual strength, rather than a socially conditioned habit. Political topics addressed here include Edmund Burke and Richard Price's efforts to define patriotism in the first year of the French Revolution, Abraham Lincoln's principled work of persuasion against slavery in the 1850s, the erosion of privacy in America under the influence of social media, and the use of euphemism to shade and anesthetize reactions to the global war on terror. Throughout, Bromwich considers the relationship between language and power, and the insights language may offer into the corruptions of power.

Moral Imagination captures the singular voice of one of the most forceful thinkers working in America today.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism, Criticism

376 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University.

Reviews

[Stan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book.

There are slight, sometimes interesting, differences between the original essays and their republished versions herewith. My favorite chapters include

0. the Preface

5. Lincoln's Constitutional Necessity

6. Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Ambition

8. How Publicity Makes People Real

10. What Is The West (Niall Ferguson)

11. Holy Terror & Civilized Terror (no hyperlink)

12.1 Cheney's Law

12.2 Euphemism and American Violence

12.3 And this 1700-word essay on William Safire.

This highly critical 4400-word essay on Obama should have been included. I wonder why it wasn't.

This essay on Hazlitt also should have been included because it's great.

[Will Ogilvie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting although It is more a collection of essays than a book with a thesis. I found very interesting the chapter on Lincoln and the darker sides of ambition. More for a literature adept than someone with interests in political philosophy, such as myself.

[Victor Osehodion Anolu · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is hard to get into but with time when David treats on recent events do one get better understanding.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has taken me some time to put together even a short review of this book--but I have found myself reading and rereading the essays since they landed in my hands. Some of them contend with the American erosion of privacy--and with that, the diminished regard for self and others. They take the reader to Lincoln and Whitman; to various works of literature, philosophy, and film; in short, to exemplars of integrity and perception.

I will say a few words about three favorites: "Moral Imagination," "Lincoln and Whitman as Representative Americans," and "How Publicity Makes People Real."

Moral imagination--the phrase, first used by Burke, may not strike us as odd at first, but David Bromwich begins with its strangeness. The two concepts do not intuitively go together. Morality has to do with real situations, real action; imagination, with what could be. So what, then, is moral imagination? I will not give away the answer here--it's worth reading in full--but I'll hint at what it is not.

On pp. 16-17, Bromwich writes: "A usual mistake of imagination--especially when heated by ambition--is to think of other people as moral objects while regarding oneself as a moral actor." Moral imagination involves a different understanding, which does not lead to self-satisfaction.

The essay on Lincoln and Whitman seems to build on these ideas. What do these two men have in common, and what sets them apart from others? "Lincoln and Whitman respect the people too much to want to flatter them," writes Bromwich on p. 97. "They agree that democracy--to remedy evils which it has itself brought into being--requires a respect more thoroughgoing than can be found in any other system of manners."

What is this respect? It has to do with integrity and individuality--and, as I understand it, with the recognition of that which is hidden in each of us. On p. 100, there is a quote from Whitman, on his impression of Lincoln (I quote the very end here): "He bow'd and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there." This passage highlights not Lincoln's expression as much as Whitman's perception. The ability to perceive "something else there" inheres in moral imagination itself.

But what happens to a people that feels compelled to put itself "out there" for everyone to see? What compromises and deceptions are involved in publicizing yourself? The essay "How Publicity Makes People Real" examines this in an eerie light. Not only do people crave publicity--but publicity, in a perverse sense, allows people to express things they would not express in private. "We have yet to reckon with the novel fact," he writes on p. 223, "that the media have been so naturalized in the lives of many that they are now widely understood to intercede for us." The word "intercede" is essential here. If, by baring yourself (or some approved version of yourself), you achieve intercession, and with that, expiation, what happens to the person who refuses to participate? The private person, the one who "resists the gaze of mass culture," will be "classified as opaque, unreliable, even (in some hard-to-capture sense) potentially hurtful to normal people" (p. 226).

What happens to the one who does submit to the public gaze? The expiation does not do the trick (since it brings new humiliation) so the person submits himself again and again. This comes across disturbingly (and hilariously) in Irving Feldman's poem "Interrupted Prayers," to which I was first introduced in this essay. I won't give it away--it's worth reading in full and in this book.

What is the cause of this great publicity push? From p. 248: "The culture of mediation has been clamoring for a long time to effect once and for all the good it wants: faster beginnings, more efficient paths all the way into our lives." Yes, this is efficiency writ large and tiny; those who comply will get swift rewards and stamps of approval, while those who resist will be excluded, subtly and slowly, from that which poses as real.

This seems gloomy indeed, but the essay points to possible responses. In particular, one can maintain *interest* in one's life, interest that does not depend on others' approval: "But one kind of moral life depends on the possibility that, even in what we do not say, even in what we do not come to be known for, we remain interesting to ourselves" (p. 249). This is not self-absorption; to the contrary, it has to do with intellectual (and emotional) delight, continuance, and questioning, for the sake of something other than the public puffing of self.

There is much more to this book--and to these particular essays--than I have begun to suggest here. They give hope in that they suggest what integrity can be. They offer education at its best.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting - some of the earlier essays were a little dense, like reading philosophy, others were easier to grasp without slowing down. I particularly liked the ones on Lincoln. Also the one where he talks about the American 'psychosis' of individualism and how it was abetted by Emerson's essay Self-Reliance - I've never read what amounts to almost a take-down of Emerson, it was kind of fun.

In the last section, clearly many of the essays were written during the Bush/Cheney years and it was surprising how disheartening I found it to go back to those days... and his essay on Edward Snowden was great, it's sad how little really has improved in our national security state.

I just skipped the last essay, thoughts on perpetual war, because I didn't want to go there - not that I expected to hate it or disagree with it, I just didn't want to go there.

Some of these will bear re-reading, but I am not going to do that right now, so many other books waiting to be read!

Favorite quote, from the title essay: "What I owe to people like me is a duty whose performance comes easily. Carrying it out is like paying dues. By contrast, justice to those who are not my kind is surprising, unrehearsed." "...on his view, which Shelley derived from Wordsworth's early poems and the preface to Lyrical Ballads - the more unlikely or remote the path of sympathy, the surer the proof of moral imagination." (page 12)

[GONZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author uses a series of essays based on discourses of men -famous for various and different reasons - like Martin Luther King, Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, etc... To highlight how the moral imagination, allows us to determine whether an action or situation are "morally right" regardless of self-interest that we may have. Clear, but not particularly compelling and at times repetitive.

L'autore utilizza una serie di saggi basati su discorsi di uomini famosi per varie ragioni (Martin Luther King, Shakespeare, Abramo Lincoln, etc.) per sottolineare come l'immaginazione morale, ci permetta di stabilire se un'azione o una situazione siano "moralmente giuste" a prescindere dal tornaconto che potremmo averne. Chiaro, ma non particolarmente avvincente ed a tratti ripetitivo.

THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS FOR THE PREVIEW!

[Ellen Hampton · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Bromwich's collection of essays have stood the test of time, for the most part, and those that seem dated are interesting in their reflection of what we were thinking at a certain point in time. I particularly appreciated his essays on Lincoln and his insights into Edmund Burke and Richard Price. I loved the idea of Lincoln and Whitman as representative Americans but Lincoln then clearly rises above the moral average and Whitman's iconoclastic nature makes him a difficult fit. So Bromwich did not prove his point, but I think it was the wrong point from the start. If we take Lincoln and Whitman instead as models of the moral imagination of his title, they stand tall. Even Burke might agree!

[Adam Gossman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most books are better the second time read through. This was no exception. Artful use of sources.

[Estep Nagy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bromwich is a remarkably deep thinker on the literary element inherent in US political life, which for me is crucial to understanding how both literature and politics work here. His two essays here on Lincoln's writings are wonderful in and of themselves, but more crucially they point toward something too often overlooked: the impact on US fiction and poetry of the red-letter immortality of some of our political writing. Jefferson, Lincoln, the Federalist Papers, Douglass, Emerson, Thoreau, Dubois, James Baldwin, all of these are writers/writings whose greatness is indivisble from political imagination, which on a personal level makes me cognizant of the fact that, when people ask me about influences, I should more often say "the Constitution" or "Lincoln's Second Inaugural".