Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Pre-reading
Arthur Meier Schlesinger (October 15, 1917-February 28, 2007) is one of the most influential American historian of the 20th century and winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize in History. Starting his career as a Harvard professor of history, he has also been a renowned educator, social critic and public intellectual. Much of Schlesinger’s work focused on the exploration of 20th century American liberalism and he had been an intellectual beacon for American liberals since 1940s.
Schlesinger served as special assistant to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president’s state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: J ohn F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize in Biography or Autobiography. Schlesinger returned to teaching in 1966 as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. After he retired from teaching in 1994, he remained involved in politics for the rest of his life through his books and public speaking tours.
Prompts for Your Reading
1.What does the title The One Against the Many mean? Find out the meaning of “one”and“many” in the passage.
2.In what way does the author believe the American experience to be instructive to new states seeking national development?
3.What factors contributed to American development according to the author? Which factor is fundamental?
4.What does the author mean by “an ideological society” (Paragraph 6)?
5.What does the author mean by ideology?
6.What does the “fox” stand for? How is the fox different from the “hedgehog”?
7.How does the author interpret the relationship between experience and abstraction?
8.How does the author differentiate ideal and ideology?
9.How is Thomas Jefferson related to the notions of ideal and ideology respectively according to the author?