America as a Civilization

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"ore than twelve years ago Max Lerner began to search for answers to the crucial questions men ask about America: What are its traditions and antecedents? How do the people make a living, govern themselves, handle the inevitable problems of power and freedom? How are they divided into ethnic and class groupings? What are they like in their deep and enduring strains? How do they court, make love, bring up and educate children? How do they work, play, express their creativeness in art and literature? What principles hold their civilization together? What gods do they worship, what beliefs give them strength, what dreams and fears are they moved by? What, in short, is it that makes America not simply a congeries of individual wills and appetites but a civilization?
This dedicated searching and researching has culminated in an immensely readable book of more than 1,000 pages which is unquestionably this distinguished writer's most important work.
In his analysis and... Tovább

Fülszöveg

M>
"ore than twelve years ago Max Lerner began to search for answers to the crucial questions men ask about America: What are its traditions and antecedents? How do the people make a living, govern themselves, handle the inevitable problems of power and freedom? How are they divided into ethnic and class groupings? What are they like in their deep and enduring strains? How do they court, make love, bring up and educate children? How do they work, play, express their creativeness in art and literature? What principles hold their civilization together? What gods do they worship, what beliefs give them strength, what dreams and fears are they moved by? What, in short, is it that makes America not simply a congeries of individual wills and appetites but a civilization?
This dedicated searching and researching has culminated in an immensely readable book of more than 1,000 pages which is unquestionably this distinguished writer's most important work.
In his analysis and interpretation of American life, the author strikes out boldly, is terrorized by no sacred cows or outworn stereotypes, and strips away many fallacies and myths about our heritage, our traditions, our performance. The book is frankly short on sentimental illusions, yet sets great value on the traditions and the vitality that underlie America's enormous powers for growth and for change. It thus enables the reader to see our American civilization steadily and see it whole —and at the same time to see it in detail.
This is the truly revolutionary America, in the sense that even in the past decade there have been changes that have transformed the face of the social landscape. There are the automatic factory, the electronic eye, the feed-back, and nuclear energy; there are the public-relations men and motivational research; there are the "new leisure," the new suburbia and exurbia, the guaranteed annual wage, and (coming very fast) the four-day work (Continued on back flap)
(Continued from front flap) week; there are the "baby boom," steady dating, the servantless family, the split-level home, the barbecue pit; there are the young people storming the gates of the colleges as never before in history; there are the paperbacks, the big-money quiz shows, the "confidential magazines," the "mutiny of the young," the "revolt of the middle-aged man"; there are the new military elite, the new "expense-account elite," the new elite of corporate and trade-union executives; there are the new stimulants and new tranquilizers, new cures and new diseases, new lives being led and new deaths being died.
It is out of such transformations that America is being continually reborn, and presenting strangely glittering facets to the observant eye.
This book, thus, is neither indictment nor apology, neither a celebration of "the American Way" nor a lament about it. The author's emphasis is primarily on the inner meaning of contemporary American civilization and its relation to the world of today. He sees America as a towering technology and culture with huge economic, military and political power, the only rival power-mass being Russia. He refuses to accept American civilization as an appendage of the Western European system, and completely repudiates both the Marxist and Machiavellian fallacies about the power pressures in American life.
As he completed each chapter in the early drafts of this work, Mr. Lerner sent copies to the key authorities in each particular field about which he was writing. He then took advantage of their co-operative criticism and counsel and revised the entire book several times in the light of these comments. The final version is therefore a work of exacting and luminous scholarship; and one extraordinary result of the process was that as each new version emerged it became more incisive, more tightly organized, more vivid, and more readable than the last one. The final form is truly magnificent.
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Jacket design by Miriam Woods Vissza