America is at war with terrorism. Terrorists must be brought to justice. We hear these phrases together so often that we rarely pause to reflect on the dramatic differences between the demands of war and the demands of justice, differences so deep that the pursuit of one often comes at the expense of the other. In this book, one of the country's most important legal thinkers brings much-needed clarity to the still unfolding debates about how to pursue war and justice in the age of terrorism. George Fletcher also draws on his rare ability to combine insights from history, philosophy, literature, and law to place these debates in a rich cultural context. He seeks to explain why Americans--for so many years cynical about war--have recently found war so appealing. He finds the answer in a revival of Romanticism, a growing desire in the post-Vietnam era to identify with grand causes and to put nations at the center of ideas about glory and guilt. Fletcher opens with unsettling questions about the nature of terrorism, war, and justice, showing how dangerously slippery the concepts can be. He argues that those sympathetic to war are heirs to the ideals of Byron, Fichte, and other Romantics in their belief that nations--not just individuals--must uphold honor and be held accountable for crimes. Fletcher writes that ideas about collective glory and guilt are far more plausible and widespread than liberal individualists typically recognize. But as he traces the implications of the Romantic mindset for debates about war crimes, treason, military tribunals, and genocide, he also shows that losing oneself in a grand cause can all too easily lead to moral catastrophe. A work of extraordinary intellectual power and relevance, the book will change how we think not only about world events, but about the conflicting individualist and collective impulses that tear at all of us.

America is at war with terrorism. Terrorists must be brought to justice. We hear these phrases together so often that we rarely pause to reflect on the dramatic differences between the demands of war and the demands of justice, differences so deep that the.

A fresh take on Romantic writers including Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats, within the culture of the Napoleonic War years.

This book is a study of war and the perceptions of war. It deals specifically with the British Romantic period writers who lived through the Napoleonic wars, and the way in which those wars affected the writing of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and many of their contemporaries. Watson discusses the particular fascination of those wars, and the way in which they affected a way of thinking about war that lasted until the early twentieth century.

Liszt in Context explores the political, social, philosophical and professional currents that surrounded Franz Liszt and illuminates the competing forces that influenced his music. Liszt was immersed in the religious, political and cultural debates of his day, and moved between institutions, places, and social circles with ease. All of this makes for a rich contextual tapestry against which Liszt composed some of the most iconic, popular, and also contentious music of the nineteenth century. His significance and astonishing reach cannot be over-stated, and his presence in nineteenth-century European culture, and his continuing influence into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, are overwhelming. The focus on context, reception, and legacy that this volume provides reveals the multifaceted nature of Liszt's impact during his lifetime and beyond.

Now in paperback, the great historian's provocative account of the rise of Romanticism. Combining his incomparable knowledge of English history with an original interpretation of British literature of the late 18th and early nineteenth century, E. P. Thompson traces the intellectual influences and societal pressures that gave rise to the English Romantic movement. Writing with great passion and literary force, Thompson examines the interaction between politics and literature at the beginning of the modern age, focusing in on the turbulent 1790s -- the time of the French and American revolutions -- through the celebrated writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

One of the century's most influential philosophers assesses a movement that changed the course of history in this unedited transcript of his 1965 Mellon lecture series. "Exhilaratingly thought-provoking".--"Times London".