The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism. - book reviews

Christian Century, June 15, 1994 by Myron A. Marty

By J. David Greenstone. Princeton University Press, 312 pp., $24.95.

READERS EXPECTING this ambitious book to be as accessible and absorbing as Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg and Mark Neely's The Last Best Hope of Earth may be disappointed. The untimely death of its author, a processor at the University of Chicago, denied him the chance to clear away the underbrush obscuring the paths he had followed in discovering what he calls "the Lincoln persuasion." J. David Greenstone's students and family members who brought his incomplete manuscript to publication were apparently reluctant to sharpen its focus, and the book suffers as a consequence.

The Lincoln Persuasion's purpose also narrow's its appeal. That purpose is to explore "how polities was and is conducted in the American context and to provide a methodological alternative to strictly causal analyses." By changing the rules of political games, Greenstone argues, Lincoln found a way to achieve what preceding generations of politicians could not: eliminating slavery while preserving the Union. His argument rests on a critique of Louis Hartzs claim that liberalism in the U.S. represented a single tradition of understanding and practice. To give his critique an additional dimension, he draws, with limited success, upon Wittgenstein's concern for the grammar of politics as an alternative to reliance on causality for explaining turns and movements in history.

Greenstone builds his argument around the notion that between the nation's founding and the Civil War, liberalism evolved in two separate strands. Leaders who placed prima emphasis or "equitably satisfying individual desires and preferences" and on achieving "tie welfare of each human being as she or he defines it" are called by Greenstone humanist liberals. In contrast, reform liberals emphasized the setting of social goals, valued positive liberty, and insisted on the obligation of individuals to develop their physical, intellectual, aesthetic and moral faculties, as well as to help others to do so. Lincoln, Greenstone contends, used a language that retained a commitment to both communities and the individuals within them; he combined a reform liberal outlook with humanist liberal institutions.

The general introduction by Carla Hess and the introduction to the concluding part by Dave Ericson help to elucidate the book's main points. As Greenstone's students, they worked with him as his arguments took shape and prepared his manuscript for publication. Even so, the nuances distinguishing Greenstone's two kinds of liberalism are frequently obscure, and the distinctions he draws between the philosophies and practices of his principal figures--John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, William Leggett, Stephen A. Douglas, Martin Van Buren and John Quincy Adams remain elusive.

Fortunately, the parts of the book dealing most directly with Lincoln's philosophy and political practices--the "Lincoln persuasion"--are easier to grasp, particularly when Greenstone contrasts Lincoln's principles and motives with those of his forebears and contemporaries. In the concluding chapter, Greenstone shows how "Lincoln's ethic asserted a union of piety with prudential rationality, and of sainthood and citizenship." Lincoln's most crucial move, he says, was to make humanitarianism politically relevant; in so doing he made it possible for the Union to survive as slavery was abolished. That this was Lincoln's greatest accomplishment is undisputed. Greenstone's treatise provides insights into his ways of accomplishing it.