All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics

by Carson Holloway, Nadia May (Read by)

The national debate over popular music’s effect on character is both furious and confused. Conservatives complain primarily about lyrics, appealing to public decency and safety. Liberals, swift to the defense of any self-expression, simultaneously celebrate rock’s liberating ethos and deny its cultural influence. Carson Holloway is out to shatter the assumptions of pop’s critics and defenders alike, showing that music is more beneficial than we think. Plato and Aristotle, Holloway finds, were aware that music can either inflame the soul with passion or can awaken it to reason and help to cultivate temperance. What Holloway proposes—a rediscovery of the musical wisdom of Plato and Aristotle—will completely change the way we think about music.

Genres: Music

Audio Cassette

First published November 1, 2000

About the author

Carson L. Holloway teaches political science at the U of Nebraska & was a trustee of Shimer College & a visiting fellow at Princeton's James Madison Program. He's recipient of a John M. Olin Foundation faculty fellowship & of grants from the H.B. Earhart* & Wm E. Simon Foundations. He's a member of the Family Research Council, American Inst for History Education, CatholicVote.org & Board Member of NHE-PAC (home educators) & director of The Assn for the Study of Free Institutions (freestudies.org). He's contributed articles to The National Review, Catholic Social Science Review & The Witherspoon Inst. [*Earhart's provided funding to European organisations promoting right-wing/neoliberal agendas. Regular recipients include the Inst of Economic Affairs think-tank & the Atlanticist Centre for Strategic Studies at the Univ of Reading headed by former Reagan official Colin S. Gray.]

Reviews

[Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought it was just OK.