Compelling essays from one of today's most esteemed cultural criticsSpanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These wide-ranging essays address thinkers and topics from Gandhi and Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, to the dangers of identity politics, to the psychology of the heroes of classic American literature.Bromwich demonstrates that moral imagination allows us to judge the right and wrong of actions apart from any benefit to ourselves, and he argues that this ability is an innate individual strength, rather than a socially conditioned habit. Political topics addressed here include Edmund Burke and Richard Price's efforts to define patriotism in the first year of the French Revolution, Abraham Lincoln's principled work of persuasion against slavery in the 1850s, the erosion of privacy in America under the influence of social media, and the use of euphemism to shade and anesthetize reactions to the global war on terror. Throughout, Bromwich considers the relationship between language and power, and the insights language may offer into the corruptions of power.Moral Imagination captures the singular voice of one of the most forceful thinkers working in America today.

Preface xiONE
1 Moral Imagination 3
2 A Dissent on Cultural Identity 40
3 The Meaning of Patriotism in 1789 70
TWO
4 Lincoln and Whitman as Representative Americans 91
5 Lincoln's Constitutional Necessity 118
6 Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Ambition 160
THREE
7 The American Psychosis 183
8 How Publicity Makes People Real 222
9 The Self-Deceptions of Empire 250
FOUR
10 What Is the West? 273
11 Holy Terror and Civilized Terror 287
12 Comments on Perpetual War 304
Cheney's Law 304
Euphemism and Violence 310
William Safire: Wars Made out of Words 324
What 9/11 Makes Us Forget 330
The Snowden Case 334
Index 345