The Soul of a Nation
America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood
- Philosophy
- Publisher: Pickwick Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2015
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Publisher's Description
In The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood, Chris Altieri contends that the forma mentis of the founders of the political society often viewed--by its members and by those external to it--as the non plus ultra of modernity, i.e., the United States of America, is really steeped in the more ancient tradition of thinking that began in Athens and continued through the Christian centuries. Engaging the twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Stanley Cavell--in critical conversation with the founding fathers--the author shows that a broad conversation regarding the constitution of society is constitutively present in the public discourse of the people that began to recognize itself during the imperial crisis of the late eighteenth-century British America; that the participants in that conversation have at least an inchoate awareness of society as at once cosmic and anthropological; and that that political society is therefore an apt field of study in and for the general science of order.
Endorsements (3)
“The Soul of a Nation is a masterful enquiry into what, essentially, America is. Altieri gives us good reason to believe that the American project, now in a precarious state, is well worth preserving and furthering, for it corresponds in important ways to man's natural aspirations.”
“Altieri gives us something rare in theological-political thought: sustained theoretical reflection on the idea of America. What orders and disorders that idea? To hold such a book in your hands, and then to read it, is to participate in fundamental questions about the soul of a nation. It is a sign of its great value that it inspired me to contemplate the representation of an order that also precedes and transcends it.”
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