The Tyranny of Fraternity in McWilliams' America

Abstract

LX AREY McWILLIAMS has written a superb book. Caution has been the spirit of Anglo-American political philosophy, at least since T. H. Green, and while this approach has hardly been futile, it is invigorating to find a work as grand as this. Ambition and nobility of purpose are the stuff from which great political philosophy needs to be made. The Idea of Fraternity in America sheds a glow of excellence on the vocation of political philosophy that will for some time to come cast a pleasant light on all of us. Moreover, McWilliams' book is something of a sui generis in another sense. Most of contemporary political philosophy is moral geometry. The form of the arguments goes far toward establishing their proof. But McWilliams apologizes for the occasional introduction of rigorous structure and opts for presenting his case as a rich fabric of discourse (McWilliams, 1973: 8). The Idea of Fraternity in America sits on one's bookshelf like an old friend who is to be consulted rather than studied or refuted. But McWilliams can dazzle the reader as well. Confronted with what is probably the best writing style to be found in political philosophy since Rousseau, one becomes so fascinated with the aesthetics of tracing the meandering paths of-fraternity in political thought that absorption is more in following McWilliams' trails than in asking the justification for the