American Politics
The Promise of Disharmony
HUP 1981- 1. The Disharmonic Polity
- “Our Practice of Your Principles”
- The One, the Two, and the Many: Structural Paradigms of American Politics
- Ideals versus Institutions
- 2. The American Creed and National Identity
- Political Thought in America
- Sources, Scope, and Stability of the Creed
- Political Ideas and National Identity
- 3. The Gap: The American Creed versus Political Authority
- Consensus and Instability
- The Gap in Comparative Perspective
- 4. Coping with the Gap
- The American Case of Cognitive Dissonance
- Patterns of Response
- The Gap and American Political Style
- 5. The Politics of Creedal Passion
- Creedal Passion Periods in American History
- The Climate of Creedal Passion
- Creedal Conflict: The Movement and the Establishment
- Reform and its Limits
- Political Earthquakes and Realignment
- 6. The Sources of Creedal Passion
- Why Creedal Passion Periods?
- General Sources: Comparable Phenomena in Other Societies
- Specific Sources: The Timing of Creedal Passion Periods
- Original Sources: The Roots of It All in the English Revolution
- The Protestantism of American Politics
- 7. The S&S Years, 1960–1975
- From the Fifties to the Seventies: The Changing Pattern of Response
- Complacency and the End(?) of Ideology
- Interlude of Hypocrisy, Surge of Moralism
- The Mobilization of Protest
- The Dynamics of Exposure
- The Legacies
- Reform and the IvI Gap
- Institutional Realignment
- The Misuse and Erosion of Authority
- Cynicism and the Restoration of Authority
- 8. The Viability of American Ideals and Institutions
- The Future of the Gap
- History versus Progress?
- America versus the World?
- Power and Liberty: The Myth of American Repression
- The Promise of Disappointment
- Notes
- Index
This stunningly persuasive book examines the persistent, radical gap between the promise of American ideals and the performance of American politics. Samuel P. Huntington shows how Americans, throughout their history as a nation, have been united by the democratic creed of liberty, equality, and hostility to authority. At the same time he reveals how, inevitably, these ideals have been perennially frustrated through the institutions and hierarchies required to carry on the essential functions of governing a democratic society.
From this antagonism between the ideals of democracy and the realities of power have risen four great political upheavals in American history. Every third generation, Huntington argues, Americans have tried to reconstruct their institutions to make them more truly reflect deeply rooted national ideals. Moving from the clenched fists and mass demonstrations of the 1960s, to the moral outrage of the Progressive and Jacksonian Eras, back to the creative ideological fervor of the American Revolution, he incisively analyzes the dissenters’ objectives. All, he pungently writes, sought to remove the fundamental disharmony between the reality of government in America and the ideals on which the American nation was founded.
Huntington predicts that the tension between ideals and institutions is likely to increase in this country in the future. And he reminds us that the fate of liberty and democracy abroad is intrinsically linked to the strength of our power in world affairs. This brilliant and controversial analysis deserves to rank alongside the works of Tocqueville, Bryce, and Hofstadter and will become a classic commentary on the meaning of America.
Samuel P. Huntington was Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University and the author of Political Order in Changing Societies.
Samuel Phillips Huntington (April 18, 1927 – December 24, 2008) was an American political scientist, adviser and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International ...
- 作者： [美]塞繆爾·亨廷頓（Samuel P.Huntington）
- 原文作者： Samuel P.Huntington
- 譯者： 周端
- 出版社：東方出版社
- 出版日期：2005
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