America through European Eyes : British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Craiutu, Aurelian (EDT)/ Isaac, Jeffrey C. (EDT)

Pennsylvania State University Press（2009/02発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 296 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780271033907
• DDC分類 303.380941

Full Description

George W. Bush's foreign policy touted America as the model of democracy worth exporting to the four corners of the globe. Osama bin Laden has painted a picture of our society as soulless and materialistic, representing values that are the antithesis of his version of Islam. Such starkly contrasting images of America fuel much heated debate today and drive conflicts around the world. But foreigners have long had a love/hate relationship with the United States, as this book reveals.

Contributors from comparative literature, history, philosophy, and political science combine their talents here to trace the changing visions of America that foreign travelers to our shores from England and France brought back to their contemporaries over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Novels and letters, political analysis, and philosophy are mined for perceptions of what America meant for these European visitors and how idealistic or realistic their observations were. Major writers such as Tocqueville play an important role in this dialogue, but so do lesser-known thinkers such as Gustave de Beaumont, Michel Chevalier, and Victor Jacquemont, whose importance this volume will help resurrect.

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Europeans in Search of America

Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey C. Isaac

Part One: America's Many Faces

1. The Idea of America in the History of European Political Thought: 1492-9/11

Alan Levine

Part Two: America and the Enlightenment

2. Notes on Bishop Berkeley's New World

Costica Bradatan

3. From Voltaire to Raynal and Diderot's Histoire des deux Indes: The French Philosophes and Colonial America

Guillaume Ansart

4. On the Political Efficacy of Idealism: Tocqueville, Schoelcher, and the Abolition of Slavery

Nick Nesbitt

Part Three: French Views of America

5. A Precursor of Tocqueville: Victor Jacquemont's Reflections on America

Aurelian Craiutu

6. Tyranny and Tragedy in Beaumont's Marie

Christine Dunn Henderson

7. French Visions of America: From Tocqueville to the Civil War

Jeremy Jennings