Democracy's Literature: Politics and Fiction in America and Political Philosophy Comes to Rick's: Casablanca and American Civic Culture

Abstract

This book is a brilliantly successful attempt to account for the apparent transition from the fierce, bitter assault on the idea of empire by the writers of the second half of the eighteenth century-from Montesquieu and Adam Smith to Benjamin Constant-to the often self-congratulatory, high-minded endorsement of a new kind of imperial mission less than half a century later, here associated most clearly with the writings of John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Book Reviews | Political Theory 574 Perspectives on Politics INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS