A Theory of Republican Character and Related EssaysSusquehanna University Press, 1994 - 166 pages ""American Democracy and the Punitive Use of Force - Requiem for the McNamara Model," the third piece in this volume, is relevant not merely for its general policy considerations (which are still meaningful after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War), but because it views the use of armed force in the context of the preservation of a system of political authority - a republican affinity - rather than primarily as an "economic" exercise in the infliction of increments of "pain."" "The collection's fourth essay is entitled "Drama and Democracy." It attempts to show how the pedagogic use of drama in the college classroom can help to keep political ways of understanding alive and respectable - in the face of the onslaught of scientific modes of explanation." "Two shorter pieces are included as appendices. The first, a public address entitled "Two Views of Aristotle's Politics" is included here for its opposition to the claim of some historians that Aristotle can hardly be of political relevance today. The second appendix is a review of Michael Oakeshott's The Voice of Liberal Learning, edited by Timothy Fuller. It is important here because Oakeshott's account of the liberal arts ideal of nurturing habits of comprehensive, individual judgment is typical of what Coats calls the "republican character.""--BOOK JACKET. |
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Page 9 - But to separate the arts which form the citizen and the statesman, the arts of policy and war, is an attempt to dismember the human character, and to destroy those very arts we mean to improve.