Sidney A. Pearson Jr. – författare

In Print the Legend: Politics, Culture, and Civic Virtue in the Films of John Ford, a collection of writers explore Ford's view of politics, popular culture, and civic virtue in some of his best films: Drums Along the Mohawk, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach, How Green Was My Valley, and The Last Hurrah. John Ford, more than most motion picture directors, invites his viewers into a serious discussion of these themes. For instance, one can consider Plato's timeless question 'What is justice?' in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, vengeance as classical Greek tragedy in The Searchers, or ethnic politics in The Last Hurrah. Ford's films never grow stale or seem dated because he continually probes the most important questions of our civic culture: what must we do to survive, prosper, pursue happiness, and retain our common decency as a regime? Further, viewing them from a distance of time, we are subtly invited to ask whether anything has been lost or gained since Ford celebrated the civic virtues of an earlier America. Is Ford's America an idealized America or a lost America?

In American politics, at least since the Civil War, the great philosophical divide is between "progressives" and "founders" of the American regime. The quarrel has come to be defined in the media as a contest between liberals and conservatives. This book explores the ideological underpinnings of American progressivism. In doing so, it examines the foundations of modern liberalism and conservatism.The fundamental problem of any science of politics is to explain, however imperfectly, the sources of justice and injustice in politics: What are the "self-evident truths" that inform and drive the public debates? Over time the foundational arguments for justice and injustice, what people regard as self-evident truths, do change. This process of change is at the heart of progressivism.The original arguments of the progressive movement are obscured or largely forgotten in contemporary political debates. But in a myriad of ways, the original progressive arguments continue to reverberate. They need to be more fully explored and understood in order to seriously engage the differences between liberals and conservatives. Such differences are not likely to be overcome simply by a study of the roots of progressivism, but it is a first step in a more rational debate, which this book will inspire.