Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans. E-book. Formato PDF Harold Stearns   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

This book has been an adventure in intellectual co-operation. If it were a mere collection of haphazard essays, gathered together to make the conventional symposium, it would have only slight significance. But it has been the deliberate and organized outgrowth of the common efforts of like-minded men and women to see the problem of modern American civilization as a whole, and to illuminate by careful criticism the special aspect of that civilization with which the individual is most familiar. Personal contact has served to correct overemphasis, and slow and careful selection of the members of a group which has now grown to some thirty-odd has given to this work a unity of approach and attack which it otherwise could not possibly have had.The nucleus of this group was brought together by common work, common interests, and more or less common assumptions. As long ago as the autumn of last year Mr. Van Wyck Brooks and I discussed the possibility of several of us, who were engaged in much the same kind of critical examination of our civilization, coming together to exchange ideas, to clarify our individual fields, and to discover wherein they coincided overlapped, or diverged. The original desire was the modest one of making it possible for us to avoid working at cross-purposes. I suggested that we meet at my home, which a few us did, and since that time until the delivery of this volume to the publishers we have met every fortnight. Even at our first meeting we discovered our points of view to have to much in common that our desire for informal and pleasant discussions became the more serious wish to contribute a definite and tangible piece of work towards the advance of intellectual life in America.

Liberalism in America: Its Origin, Its Temporray Collapse, Its Future. E-book. Formato PDF Harold Stearns   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

Now as a matter of fact such a review would strike me as, on the whole, reasonably fair. The first chapter wanders a tri?e because the definition of liberalism which I make of a tolerant and rationalistic temper, best ex pressed, perhaps, by Voltaire 's letter to Helvetius, I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it — is so simple that I prefer to a merely verbal discussion an attempt to put concretely what this attitude implies in life. For that reason I chose the fact of conscription in modern States.