Jedediah Purdy is an intellectual force to be reckoned with. Home schooled in West Virginia, he received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and went on to Yale Law School. He now serves as a fellow of the New America Foundation, while clerking for a federal judge. Just 28 years old, Purdy is a thinker at once pragmatic and idealistic, who attempts the almost impossible task of being a patriotic American while being critical of America.
His previous book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (1999), blamed irony for the decay of moral values in America. Purdy’s latest, Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World, is the result of his journeys after September 11 to China, India, Egypt, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and, as he says, “elsewhere.” The book “is a meditation of the question: What would be a properly liberal view of today’s world?” He insists that “today’s world, with all its potential for violence and intolerance, needs the liberal spirit.” Purdy seeks to reinstate the liberal attitude front and center in American politics. He makes one yearn for “liberalism that is founded on clarity about core moral values: individual dignity, political equality, and abhorrence of cruelty. ” The author shows a deep and thoughtful acquaintance with the works of such intellectual giants as Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Montaigne, and a fondness for James Madison.
Some readers will admire Jedediah Purdy, and some will be frustrated and annoyed by him he knows too much! And he tells all! Derrick M. Norman is retired after a long career in publishing and book selling.
