Robert Dawidoff - The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture Vs. Democracy in Adams, James, and Santayana (Cultural Studies of the United States)

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title	:	The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage : High Culture Vs. Democracy in Adams, James, & Santayana Cultural Studies of the United States
author	:	Dawidoff, Robert.
publisher	:	University of North Carolina Press
isbn10 | asin	:	0807820172
print isbn13	:	9780807820179
ebook isbn13	:	9780807861004
language	:	English
subject	Santayana, George,--1863-1952--Knowledge--America, Tocqueville, Alexis de,--1805-1859--Influence, James, Henry,--1843-1916.--Ambassadors, Adams, Henry,--1838-1918.--Democracy, American prose literature--History and criticism, National characteristics, Ame
publication date	:	1992
lcc	:	PS362.D38 1992eb
ddc	:	818/.40809/358
subject	:	Santayana, George,--1863-1952--Knowledge--America, Tocqueville, Alexis de,--1805-1859--Influence, James, Henry,--1843-1916.--Ambassadors, Adams, Henry,--1838-1918.--Democracy, American prose literature--History and criticism, National characteristics, Ame

Page i The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage

Page ii CULTURAL STUDIES OF THE UNITED STATES ALAN TRACHTENBERG EDITOR

Page iii The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, & Santayana Robert Dawidoff THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS CHAPEL HILL & LONDON

Page iv (c) 1992 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Manufactured in the United States of America 96 95 94 93 92 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dawidoff, Robert. The genteel tradition and the sacred rage : high culture vs. democracy in Adams, James, and Santayana/Robert Dawidoff. p. cm.(Cultural studies of the United States) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8078-2017-2 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. American prose literatureHistory and criticism. 2. National characteristics, American, in literature. 3. Santayana, George, 1863-1952KnowledgeAmerica. 4. Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859Influence. 5. Literature and societyUnited States. 6. James, Henry, 1843-1916. Ambassadors. 7. Adams, Henry, 1838-1918. Democracy. 8. United StatesCivilization. 9. Democracy in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PS362.D38 1992 818'.40809'358dc20 91-30746 CIP

Page v For my friend Richard Rouilard

Page vii Contents Foreword by Alan Trachtenberg ix Acknowledgements xiii Introduction xv Chapter One. Tocqueville and the American Mind 1 Chapter Two. Henry Adams: The First American Tocquevillian 31 Chapter Three. Henry James and the Sacred Rage 75 Chapter Four. George Santayana and the Genteel Tradition 142 Conclusion 194 Notes 201 Bibliography 209 Index 215

Page ix Foreword Something of a taboo seems to have fallen over the word democracy. It is rarely encountered anymore in humanistic studies, snubbed in favor of gender, class, race, region. The particularist emphasis of these terms may represent a deliberate refusal of the universalist implications of grand concepts like democracy. Of course, reasons abound for suspicion of the word, its unsavory nationalist resonances, countless betrayals undertaken in its name. But its dropping out of serious use among cultural historians and critics may signify something more fundamental and significant, an unease and embarrassment with a term so charged with challenges to the very enterprise of studying the culture in which we participate. The posture of the cultural critic implies detachment, a certain degree of apartness. Doesn't the idea of a democratic order, of social and political equality, put the serious critic at risk of estrangement, of seeming superior, ungrateful, ungenerous? To think of yourself as cultured, as detached enough to make judgments, isn't this already to think of oneself as unequal, superior, set apart from the mass? Criticism demands distance, it asserts difference, it enacts discrimination. Democracy seems to impose compliance, acceptance of common norms and collective opinion, all that Tocqueville meant by the "tyranny of the majority." Disenchantment with the system of popular government in America, a defining aspect of cultural criticism at least since Emerson, has only driven the word democracy further into the background. Seeming irreconcilable, the antinomies of culture and democracy have receded from the foreground of attention they once commanded, say, in the works of Whitman and of the generation of Van Wyck Brooks, Constance Rourke, and John Dewey. Robert Dawidoff's book restores the question of culture and democracy to the prominence it once had. It revives the relevance of the word

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