J. David Hoeveler

James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: From Glasgow to Princeton

James McCosh played a leading role in the effort to reconcile two powerful intellectual and social forces of the nineteenth century: evolution and evangelicalism. In the first modern biography of this philosopher, religious leader, and educator, J. David Hoeveler demonstrates McCoshs significance for Scottish and American philosophy and for American education.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A Review of “God—Or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age”

Although he calls Woolman “a model of Christian charity” (3) and equates him with the Old Testament prophets who “offered a message of hope, and held [themselves] to uncompromising standards” (9), Slaughter has not written a hagiography. He presents a man who was “petty,” capable of making “aesthetic molehills into mountains of sins,” “detached and distracted,” and “possibly emotionally withdrawn from those closest to him” even as “his saintliness never approached the perfection he aimed for” (10). However, Slaughter explains how these flawed realities were part of Woolman’s “universal love, high moral standards, and open heart” (151): Woolman was “internally motivated rather than externally moved” (143) and willing “to lead those who cannot see the way” (8). Slaughter follows Woolman’s path from New Jersey, where he was born in 1720, to England, where he died of smallpox in 1772. As he does so, he effectively but softly—even lyrically—demonstrates that Woolman’s “genius” (142) was his ability to present his arguments against slavery and other evils “in gentle, humble terms” (138) that were powerful without becoming either judgmental or accusatory. Slaughter seems to be working in sync with Woolman to clarify, even to students unfamiliar with the complex issues confronted in this book, how a man could see others as more important than himself and assume the guilt for society’s moral failings. Slaughter also demonstrates how history, theology, and psychology must necessarily come together if the past is ever to make sense—and that they can do so without the jargon and technical explanations that quickly lose most students. In trying to explain a man who could “simultaneously [be] a throwback, a man of his times, and a preacher too modern for his flock” (10), Slaughter ventures directly but delicately into Quakerism, witchcraft, the Great Awakening, the Enlightenment, the Bible, and slaveholding colonial America. He covers such varied influences (and evidence) as dreams, robins, Thomas à Kempis, and the French and Indian War. Using Woolman’s Journal, particularly Amelia Mott Gummer’s 1922 edition; Woolman’s influential Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754); and drafts of writings and letters in various collections, Slaughter pieces together a puzzle of incomplete evidence to explain “how the boy who read the Bible became the saint and reformer” (56), a man who rejected any form of complacency and moral compromise. Cautiously speculating from both evidence and gaps in the evidence, Slaughter notes when “we do not know” (149) and when “we are left to wonder” (168). By doing so, he manages to clarify even more of Woolman’s inner life. In other words, Slaughter is strikingly successful in making John Woolman less of a mystery to modern readers and ensuring that the label “abolitionist” (like “reformer,” “Christian,” “mystic,” and others) has a useful meaning. No one can read The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, the first major biography of the reformer, and not better understand both the daunting task of opposing slavery in a period when slaveholding was widely unquestioned and the overwhelming specialness of a man determined to live by God’s law, not man’s.

Populism, Politics, and Public Policy: 1970s Conservatism

A quarter century and more has passed since the 1970s made its debut. History, always problematic as an objective undertaking, encourages present-mindedness when proximity to events in question governs our perspectives. This article does not pretend to have avoided this pitfall. Today the animus against government dominates political discourse. “Outsiders” who aspire to office boast of that status; “insiders” obscure theirs. All politicians design to show their commonness, their oneness with the people, the beleaguered people, victims of the socially privileged, of haughty bureaucrats, and the sundry occult forces that sustain their misery. Ours, it has been observed, has become a dominantly “populist” culture, its anti-elitism resounding from local Serb Halls in Milwaukee and elsewhere to the very chambers of the Capitol itself.

Metaphysics and the Masses

A specter has been haunting Western intellectuals. For nearly five decades the problem of mass society has reigned as the central preoccupation for those who have pondered why the world went awry in a century of world war and totalitarian rule. And the specter appears with striking vividness in the image of a dominant social type-the uprooted individual, rudderless, anonymous, responsive to any external force but always to the most powerful. The type symbolizes the castoffs of a world fragmented by irrepressible social change and its accompanying political disorder. But mass man is, above all, frightening in his collectivity, for the centrifugal forces that have loosed the parts of society also create the centripetal forces that restore order and discipline. Mass man is only too willing to march in tune. Totalitarianism, we have been told, is the political logic of twentieth-century life. Its main ingredients are what Hannah Arendt called the masses of coordinated