In this intellectual history of American liberalism during the
second half of the nineteenth century, Leslie Butler examines a
group of nationally prominent and internationally oriented writers
who sustained an American tradition of self-consciously progressive
and cosmopolitan reform. She addresses how these men established a
critical perspective on American racism, materialism, and jingoism
in the decades between the 1850s and the 1890s while she recaptures
their insistence on the ability of ordinary citizens to work toward
their limitless potential as intelligent and moral human
beings.
At the core of Butler's study are the writers George William
Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and
Charles Eliot Norton, a quartet of friends who would together
define the humane liberalism of America's late Victorian middle
class. In creative engagement with such British intellectuals as
John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen,
John Ruskin, James Bryce, and Goldwin Smith, these "critical
Americans" articulated political ideals and cultural standards to
suit the burgeoning mass democracy the Civil War had created. This
transatlantic framework informed their notions of educative
citizenship, print-based democratic politics, critically informed
cultural dissemination, and a temperate, deliberative foreign
policy. Butler argues that a careful reexamination of these strands
of late nineteenth-century liberalism can help enrich a revitalized
liberal tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century.