The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage

Asking why many American intellectuals have had such difficulty accepting wholeheartedly the cultural dimensions of democracy, Robert Dawidoff examines their alienation and ambivalence, a tradition of detachment he identifies as “Tocquevillian.” In the work of three towering American literary figures - Henry Adams, Henry James, and George Santayana — Dawidoff explores fully this distancing and uneasy response to democratic culture. Linked together by common Harvard, Cambridge, and New England co