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Democracy - A Classic Political Novel of Power, Ambition, and Washington Society
Paperback
Classic FictionGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction
ISBN13: 9781617206078
Publisher: SMK Books
Published: Jan 24 2012
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.54
Height: 0.37 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A sharp and ironic novel of politics, ambition, and moral compromise, Democracy is Henry Adams's penetrating portrait of Washington society and the uneasy machinery of American power.
Madeleine Lee, a wealthy and intelligent widow from New York, comes to Washington seeking a deeper understanding of public life. Disappointed by fashionable society and hungry for something more substantial, she hopes to discover whether democracy contains any real nobility of purpose. What she finds instead is a world of charm, calculation, patronage, and compromise, where public ideals are often bent to private ambition and where political success depends as much on performance as conviction.
At the center of the novel is Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe, a powerful and skillful politician whose blunt manners and apparent sincerity both attract and repel Madeleine. As she studies him and the circle around him, she is forced to confront the difference between political rhetoric and political reality. First published anonymously in 1880, Democracy remains a brilliant American political novel, exposing the tension between principle and power with wit, skepticism, and remarkable modernity.
Adams writes with the cool precision of an insider who understood both the attractions and the corruptions of public life. The novel is not merely a satire of Washington manners, but a serious examination of whether democratic government can produce moral leadership, and whether private virtue can survive contact with institutional power. Its questions about influence, image, ambition, and compromise remain as recognizable now as they were in the Gilded Age.
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