Occasionally, even the student of American culture grown accustomed to its odd couples — Thomas Morton and lasses in beaver coats, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mark Twain and the Reverend Joseph Twichell — is brought up short. One does not, after all, expect to encounter the language and cadences of Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in a Walt Disney production of Pollyanna, a film in which the heroine's gladness has come to fulfill roughly the function of divine grace. And it is only slighdy less improbable to encounter in the New Yorker for 31 July 1978 the disembodied, dialectical voices of Donald Barthelme's The Leap, agreeing to postpone the leap of faitli to another day, setting aside their awareness that “We hang by a slender thread. — The fire boils below us — the pit. Crawling with roaches and other tilings. — Torture unimaginable.”

The use and misuse of Jonathan Edwards, or less moralistically, the observable process of advocacy, condemnation, adaptation, and creative redefinition focussed on his life and work, has a long and instructive history. In October of 1903 an important stage in that process had been reached when bicentennial celebrations of Edwards' birth resulted in a flourishing of tributes to die Edwards legacy and assessments of the permanent and the passing in his diought, as one writer put it. We may now, three quarters of a century later, have reached a stage of comparable significance, with a potential both for summing up and for speculating on what lies ahead.

Few American wars have been as closely tied to international law as the Anglo-American conflict of 1812. The legality or otherwise of impressment and cargo confiscation, definitions of contraband, blockade and the permissible limits of neutrality have all been endlessly argued. Such questions concern the causes of the war. What has attracted little attention, despite the keen contemporary awareness of the existence of laws on the conduct of nations, is the extent to which legal restrictions were observed in the actual waging of the War of 1812.

The notion that there were any limits at all is against the trend noted by those historians and specialists in military affairs who have observed that “restricted war was one of the loftiest achievements of the eighteenth century,” but that “the doctrines of the French Revolution brought a new intensity to warfare,” that unlimited war was reborn in August 1793, so that “by the beginning of tlie nineteenth century…the limitations on the violence of war that had been imposed by the small-scale eighteenth-century armies had already disappeared.”

However true these generalizations may be for Europe, the idea of limited war still thrived in North America in 1812 and throughout the subsequent war there.

Hegel, in the posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), saw America as “the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.” Such enthusiasm was reciprocated in a curious and revealing manner both by American philosophers and by the representatives of other American social institutions, as I hope to show in this article. American neo-Hegelianism was, like its British counterpart, belated but significant in its influence on academic or “professional” philosophy. However, in contrast to the story of Anglo-Hegelianism as we know it through the lives and work of such figures as Benjamin Jowett, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley and their followers, academic influence in America was short-lived, while its general cultural significance, as measured through the history of institutions other than the university, was much more profound.

In the bulk of this article I shall try to support these contentions as follows. First, I shall offer a definition of the philosophical position adopted by neo-Hegelian groups in Great Britain and the United States, beginning in the 1860s. Secondly, I shall give an outline of the career of Absolute Idealism (and Hegelianism in particular) in America up to the First World War.

Much has been written about community in Yoknapatawpha; a great deal of it reads like an apology for Arcadia. Cleanth Brooks is a persistent offender:

The little town is old-fashioned and backward looking. It is suspicious of any outsiders who would disturb its life, and when it cannot expel the alien, it tries to wall him off in a kind of cultural cyst as bees enclose with waxen walls a beetle or wasp that has got inside the hive.

The activities of Jefferson, Miss., in Light in August strike me as being less benevolent than the activities of bees. However, my point is more general: even in “old fashioned” communities people do not “Know who they are and where they belong” (xviii) as of a timeless right. They know because they engage in social exchanges which substantiate or qualify their belonging.

Recently Myra Jehlen has undertaken a class-based analysis of such exchanges. In Class and Character in Faulkner's South she discovers “the living pulse” of Yoknapatawpha in its “tangled social context.” As a result, she pleads with some justification for a shift of interest towards class in Faulkner scholarship:

William Faulkner was obsessed by history … [and] he drew characters whose inner lives are essentially linings for selves tailored to unalterable social patterns.… His people's tragedy is that their interior world has been co-opted by an external world they never made and apparently no one can ever unmake, (p. 1)