Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (Castle Lectures Series) - Hardcover

Robert B. Pippin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300145772 ISBN 13: 9780300145779

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2010

Synopsis

In this pathbreaking book one of America's most distinguished philosophers brilliantly explores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks' 'Red River' and John Ford's 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' and 'The Searchers'. Robert Pippin treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history: its 'second founding', or the western expansion. His central question concerns how these films explore classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gain some hold on individuals at a time when the heroic and martial virtues were so important. Westerns, Pippin shows, raise central questions about the difference between private violence and revenge and the state's claim to a legitimate monopoly on violence, and they show how these claims come to be experienced and accepted or rejected. Pippin's account of the best Hollywood Westerns brings this genre into the centre of the tradition of political thought, and his readings raise questions about political psychology and the political passions that have been neglected in contemporary political thought in favour of a limited concern with the question of legitimacy.

About this title

Review:

"A trenchant and illuminating study of three great Westerns and a convincing case for their importance both to political psychology and to our own self-understanding as Americancitizens." C. D. C. Reeve, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill --C. D. C. Reeve"

About the Author:

Robert Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Philosophy, and in the College at the University of Chicago.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0300145772
• ISBN 13: 9780300145779
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208