Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination by Joyce Appleby (review)

Book Reviews 133 character to tell what only the author was properly empowered to know. But, because Presley was as baffled about the forces of life as all the characters were, Norris could not follow the realist dictum that readers should see characters who responded to the real values of life. If Norris failed to extricate himself from realism, Crane succeeded. Crane's style was ironic, able to indicate that what a reader was to see in a character was an inversion of what was ostensibly real; thus, a reader had to read behind the text, rather than be "unconscious," and Crane's style made this reading transparent in a non-Howellsian manner. Finally, Bell makes a succinct case for Dreiser's possession of a style. "Style" is, as one might infer from the previous chapters, the way out of Howells's "problem of realism," for, by style, one could create values within a text rather than represent contemporary social values. Dreiser's density of detail and essays on the real world of business have usually been considered his substitute for a style. However, Bell presents Dreiser as an ironist who first rises above the characters of a story and then suddenly effaces this ironic distance, effecting an oveIWhelmingsympathy which unites reader and character; the reader shares a natural immediacy with Hurstwood amidst the splendours of the bar at Fitzgerald and May's, and with IIurstwood, as he refuses to think as he turns on the gas for his suicide. Bell demonstrates that naturalism is more of a reaction to, not an extension of, realism. He also suggests that the concern over style makes naturalism the immediate basis of literary modernism found in Hemingway and Fitzgerald. For these disjunctions and reconnections, the book has great value. John Stephen Martin Universityof Calgary •••••• Joyce Appleby. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical /magi.nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Pp. 351. "National histories," Joyce Appleby writes, "rest on a volatile mixture of the moral and the instrumental" (31). They provide a framework for the moral consensus which is necessary to sustain a society, while ongoing debates and revisions, by offering new definitions of the past, suggest new possibilities for the future. In the American case, this consensus was, for a long time, based on 134 Canadian Review of American Studies an acceptance of the view that Americanhistocy could be understood simply as the development of liberalism. In the latter decades of this centucy, this historical interpretation has been severely criticized and effectively abandoned. In Appleby's view, the most effective instrument of its defeat was the republican revision, and it is her critique of this strain of historical and philosophical scholarship which is the unifying theme of the essays in this volume. Rather than accepting the traditional view of the development of American democracy as the progressive realization of liberal and capitalist ideals, in the Bacon-LockeSmith tradition, this view tends to portray the founding, not as the working out of a radically new world-view, but as the realization of Renaissance thought. While she does not wholeheartedly accept this view, Appleby has a realistic appreciation both of its value to historical scholarship and the attraction it holds for many scholars: Classical republicanism offers late-twentieth-centucy men and women an attractive alternative to liberalism and socialism. Both substantively, in the recovety of a Renaissance discourse of politics, and theoretically, in the reliance on an anthropological understanding of how societies structure consciousness, the republican revision has inspired a whole generation of scholars in histocy, political science, literature, and law. Because it demonstrates colonial support for a political order that emphasizes virtue, participation , and deliberation, the revision has changed our perceptions about what was possible in the eighteenth century and, by inference, what might be possible today. Standing outside the liberal field of imagination, it has become a vantage point for assessing that field. Like a magnet, republicanism has drawn to it the filingsof contemporary discontents with American politics and culture. (23) Political philosophers, primarily, but not exclusively, conservatives, have been drawn to republicanism, seeing in it a way to replace the ignoble and discredited ideology of liberalism with a more admirable alternative...