Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict Paperback – July 9, 2018 by John Burt (Belknap / Harvard University Press)

Moby Dick" was still required reading when I was in high school. Some wag had gone through all the copies in the school library and crossed out, in the table of contents, the chapters on the technical details of the whaling industry with the sage advice "Don't read these." I am not in favor of defacing books, but someone should do the same with the majority of paragraphs in John Burt's "Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism."

The book concerns the historical, political, and philosophical background of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates; it does not deal directly with the debates themselves. (Nor does it purport to). In this regard it is similar to Harry Jaffa's "Crisis of the House Divided." The problem arises when the author goes beyond the differences between the political philosophies of Lincoln and Douglas and starts to deal with the philosophy of political philosphy itself. He largely analyzes John Rawls and posits what his political philosophy might bring to bear on the philosophical differences between Lincoln and Douglas. The abstruse nature of this focus would be complicated and boring enough, but then Burt compounds that mistake by adopting an outrageously pretentious and pedantic style. Here is an example from pp. 72-73 which is, alas, far from unique but manages to cram so much of what is obnoxious about Burt's style into just a single sentence: "The South was not alone in wielding suicidally apodictic statements, and such statements tend to ratchet each other up in a kind of 'Wechselwirkung' that ought to be familiar to anyone who has ever found himself enmeshed in an argumentative economy of reciprocated vituperation." What? John Burt is an English Professor. Surely he must have heard of Jonathan Swift and the Plain Style...if only he had employed it in this book.

Anyone interested in learning about the extremely interesting and important issues underlying the Lincoln-Douglas Debates would do well to start with Allen Guelzo's "Lincoln and Douglas" and then, if he or she wants more on the political and philosophical backgound, go on to Jaffa. But in my opinion, John Burt's "Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism" has nothing at all to recommend it except, perhaps, to a Rawl's specialist.