This work brings together Max Lemer's extended and enduring essays on Aristotle, Niccolb Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Thorstein Veblen, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Combining biography and interpretation, Lerner insightfully examines a cluster of thinkers who helped shape his own influential work in political theory and civilizational analysis. Viewed collectively, these essays show Turner's method and mind at their best.Like Lerner himself, the masters were toug...

Readers who miss the magisterial pronunciamentos of the late Max Lerner . . . will relish this collection of Lerner’s writings on a subject that preoccupied him.” -BooklistMax Lerner taught generations of Americans about their government. For almost half a century, the office of the presidency preoccupied his prodigious energies and unparalleled expertise. Lerner not only wrote about the men who inhabited the Oval Office during that time, he knew them per...

This book was first published in 1938, and it was regarded as a tract for the times—an impression which its title and its note of tension reinforced. In this new edition the author extends the analysis to the events of the intervening years.

This audiobook is narrated by Azalea Labs using an AI-generated voice. NINE SCORPIONS in a BOTTLE by Max Lerner offers profound insights into the US Supreme Court and the interpretation of the Constitution. Lerner, a keen observer of court-watching for over fifty years, outlines his vision of an ideal Supreme Court, one that balances judicial power with independence and reflectiveness, and profiles the great justices who embodied this ideal.

Over the course of more than six decades as an author, journalist, and professor, Max Lerner studied and assessed many presidents, yet Thomas Jefferson received his most sustained attention. To Lerner, Jefferson came closest in the American context to Plato's "philosopher-king," the ideal thinker and leader. Because of his keen sense of Jefferson's virtues and his unique place in United States history, Lerner began work on a book about Jefferson in 1957, rewriting it several times througho...

Using documents from German sources…Final Judgment: The Story of Nuremberg is a revealing X-ray of the whole political, economic, and moral system that the Nazis built up. It uses the Nuremberg trials as its starting point. But it peels away, one after another, the layers of meaning behind Nuremberg.Anyone who followed the reports of the trials in the American press must have been dismayed by their fragmentary and superficial character. All we got were bits and pieces of the Nazi st...

Ideas for the Ice Age is a companion volume to Max Lerner's classic work Ideas Are Weapons. Both were written mostly in the 1930s, as products of a period when the democratic idea was under heavy siege from totalitarian ideologies of the right and left., In its focus, Ideas for the Ice Age is a study of the task of democracy in a revolutionary era, an enterprise that has taken on new urgency in the post-Communist world. For Lerner this task comprises four aspects around which the book is o...

“This is the story of a long and brilliant career in American education... [Johnson] writes with humor, modesty, and what seems to be total recall, a fascinating report of a useful life.” — Bruce Bliven, The New York Times“Alvin Johnson has written a first-rate life history, but by that fact he has also written a good deal more. For he has told his life in a way that shows how it holds in microcosm all the dominant themes of our American history and societ...

The New York Times –bestselling biography of President Lyndon Johnson from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author, "America's historian-in-chief" ( New York Magazine ).With a new foreword by the authorFeaturing a 2018 foreword by the Pulitzer Prize–winning political historian that celebrates a reappraisal of Lyndon Johnson's legacy five decades after his presi...

An artful portrait of a complex, formative figure in American history and his turbulent era, from a New York Times –bestselling author."A balanced, readable portrait. A refreshing perspective." — New York Times Book ReviewIn this unique biography of Thomas Jefferson, leading journalist and social critic Christopher Hitchens offers a startlingly new and provocative interpr...

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner: "Of all the Kennedy books . . . this is the best." — TimeArthur M. Schlesinger Jr. served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy throughout his presidency—from the long and grueling campaign to Kennedy's tragic and unexpected assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. In A Thousand Days, Schlesinger combines intimate knowledge as one of President Kennedy's inner circle with sweeping research and hi...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian examines transformational leaders from Moses to Machiavelli to Martin Luther King Jr. in this "impressive book" ( The Washington Post).Historian and political scientist James MacGregor Burns has spent much of his career documenting the use and misuse of power by leaders throughout history. In this groundbreaking study, Burns examines the qualities that make certain leaders—in America and elsewhere—succeed as transformativ...