A truly outstanding book. John Patrick Diggins is the greatest intellectual historian writing about America -- and this book (like his others) reflects that.

While the treatment of Weber's life and thoughts is quite useful and rather well written, the text contains over thirty (30)errors of German and Latin expressions. These are orthographical,
wrong gender endings, word distortions beyond recognition, etc.
Even historical names, like Leibknecht (for Karl Liebknecht) and Sombardt(for Werner Sombart) have been mangled.
For a work with "academic" pretensions -- the author is a professor at CCNY -- this is regrettable. One wonders what the numerous editors, proofreaders, and so on have done other than
base their "imprimatur" on self-attested expertise.

I certainly agree with the earlier reviewer from Portugal as to the high quality of Diggins' book. However, the reviewer is wrong about the term "iron cage." Weber very clearly refers to capitalism as an "iron cage" in the powerful concluding pages of his book "The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism." Weber both admired and feared the economic system that he saw as our fate. In a world in which values inevitably conflict and unintended consequences are the rule, every social system and every social initiative will be tinged with irony and tragedy. Capitalism is no exception; it is a mixed bag, both beneficial and costly. For Weber, only by both responsibly safeguarding ourselves from its more dehumanizing features and at the same time measuring up to its demands upon individual initiative can the human spirit survive and in some measure determine its future. We are suspended, with no relief other than our own individual and collective will to act, between these perennial and contradictory demands. Weber harbored both hopes and doubts that human beings were up to the task. Diggins' book brings out this message very well.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Max Weber was a modern thinker who defied categorization. Was he a philosopher, an historian, a political theorist or a sociologist? This leads to some confusion as to his message. For instance, contrary to what one of the reviews mentions, Weber didn't view Capitalism as an "iron cage", but it's modern derivative, bureaucracy as that cage. Few people will argue with that comment. Strangely enough too, as Professor Diggins indicates, the questions that Weber struggled with one hundred years ago are still very much with us today. Could that be because the situation of pre-World War I Germany burdened as it was with a dysfunctional political system and weak leaders, yet possessing a strong, vigorous economy and formidable military, is very similar to the that of America today? I found the author's discussion of Weber's problems of reconciling the "ethic of principled convictions" with the "ethic of responsibility" particularly timely. After finishing the book I found myself wanting to know more about Max Weber's insights into the modern condition.

Professor John Diggins's study is part history, part philosophy, and part polemic. The title of the book suggests a study of Abraham Lincoln and his impact on American values. The exploration of this subject alone is a formidable task, but Professor Diggins adds to it with his discussions of the American Revolution, the political philosophy of Locke, the observations on American character of de Tocqueville, the political economic theorizing of Veblen and Weber, the studies of American liberalism by Louis Hartz, and much more.

Professor Diggins argues against those scholars who see Lincoln exclusively as a pragmatic policitican and claims that our Sixteenth President sought a foundational, non-relativistic source for our political values in the principle that all men are created equal, and in the right of all to work and to strive to own property and to better themselves. Lincolns' philosophy, Diggins claims, had its roots in the Declaration of Independence and in Lockean ideas. His reading of Lincoln is supported by discussions of numberous speeches and writings, most of which can be found in the wonderful two-volume Library of America edition of Lincoln's writings.

The broad targets of Professor Diggins's book are philosophical relativists. Much of the book, however, is devoted to a polemic against modern multiculturalism and deconstruction. Lincoln, the philosophy of consensus (one shared broadly by Americans irrespective of their interest group, race, sex, status), and the value of work motivated by material self-interest are defended as an integral part of the American vision, striven for by all and, paradoxically, expanding the scope of our liberties.

The book suffers, I think, from being overly ambitious and from its structure. The arguments are unduly repetitive and this, I think, hinders Professor Diggins from developing them with the depth they deserve. The book strays too far from Lincoln. While much of the discussion of other figures in the book is valuable and illuminating, particularly the discussion of Professor Hartz and of the Federalists, it moves too far from Lincoln or, more precisely, it gives the book a loose free-wheeling character with ideas suggested rather than sufficiently developed. Similarly, Professor Diggins's criticism of multiculturalism, with which I greatly sympathize, is not well integrated with the rest of the book. It is simply too much to do a political polemic, a study of Lincoln, and a treatment of American intellectual history in a single, relatively short volume.

These quibbles to one side, the work is well worth reading. It explores our American heritage, challenges prevailing orthodoxies and offers much for further study and reflection. This is a worthwhile exploration of important issues in the nature of our precious American experience.

This book presents an excellent and very articulate summary of not only President Lincoln, but the entire nation as a whole. It sure seems that John Diggins has been 'diggin' through a lot of material, and has come up with excellent research, and it shows in the quality of this publication. Two thumbs up!

Historical reviewer Carter was correct in putting Diggins in the synthesis camp. Diggins acknowledged the revisionist view on many events. He agreed with the revisionist view that Roosevelt could have done more to save Jews in the concentration camps. But Diggins also pointed out the traditionalist view that Roosevelt felt defeating the Nazi war machine was the best long-term salvation for the Jews.
He showed both sides over the debate on dropping the atomic bomb. He brought up the revisionists' opinions that Truman could have simply had a demonstration of the bomb on an island near Japan, and that the second bomb was dropped too soon after the first, not giving the Japanese government time to react. Yet Diggins also admitted that Japanese soldiers had not shown a willingness to surrender and that an invasion would have killed more people than the bombs killed. He wrote: 'The sorrow and the glory in this period of America's past are inseparable. To be worthy of truth, history must make us shudder as well as smile.' Diggins is a true synthesis historian.

Having been assigned this book for a UCLA history course, I expected the usual leftist slant. I found no such slant, however. This book was bold: chapters on not only the basics of the era (WWII, Korean War, McCarthyism), but on American social trends. The standard political history I thought I was to read turned into a unique blend of the political and social aspects of America through the "proud decades". Blasting away any such slant I cynically assumed would exist, the author writes on such figures as William F. Buckley, Jr. and F.A. Hayek. I must admit, such references are brief, but the fact that were indeed there says a lot about the work as a whole. I commend the author for producing a "one-stop shop" for America in the 40's through the 50's.

Diggins approaches pragmatism as an historian but with the expert knowledge of a philosopher. He begins with the historian Henry Adams, analyzing his work and its relation to both American culture and American pragmatism and ends with poststructuralism, relating similar themes and techniques between the two geographically and conceptually distinctive philosophies. Diggins also addresses American thinkers not always covered in works on pragmatism: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sidney Hook, George Mead, Reinhold Niebuhr. In this way he places pragmatism in a much broader context than it usually appears. Pragmatism then becomes not merely a theoretical construct but a product of and an influence on socio-historical reality in America. He places Peirce, James, Dewey, et al. in an historical context, thus making explicit the American culture that went into the development of their thought and the way in which their thought affected American culture and history, not just academia. It is the most impressively comprehensive work on pragmatism I've ever encountered. And that the book was written by an historian, not a philosopher, in my opinion, is only a plus. I say this as a philosopher myself. The perspective of an historian is fresh and illuminating, and the knowledge of the philosophy itself that he demonstrates would rival that of any "official" philosopher. Most interestingly, he ends the book comparing pragmatism and New or Neopragmatism with continental philosophy, especially poststructuralism, drawing provocative parallels and contrasts. The book's only shortcoming is that, in spite of the comprehensiveness lauded above, like most secondary sources on pragmatism, it completely neglects the work of the under-appreciated Alain Locke. But, perhaps, due to the work's historical context, the fact that Locke has been ignored in the rest of culture and academia (more likely due to his race and sexuality than the quality of his philosophy) explains his lack of relevance to Diggins's book.