Writing Politics

David Bromwich is one of the most well-informed, cogent, and morally uncompromising political writers on the left today. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics and the author of a magisterial intellectual biography of Edmund Burke. In Writing Politics, Bromwich presents twenty-seven essays by different writers from the beginning of the modern political world in the seventeenth century until recent times, essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history—revolution and war, racism, women’s rights, the status of the worker, the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence and non-violence, among them—and essays that have also been chosen as superlative examples of the power of written English to reshape our thoughts and the world. Jonathan Swift, Burke, Thoreau, Lincoln, George Eliot, Harriet Taylor, W. E. B. DuBois, Gandhi, George Orwell, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt are here, among others, together with a wide-ranging introduction in which Bromwich considers the character and significance of political argument and the true power of eloquence.