{"product_id":"9781590175514","title":"The Liberal Imagination","description":"\u003ci\u003eThe Liberal Imagination\u003c\/i\u003e is one of the most admired and  influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not  only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement  about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier  moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and  limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal  belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other  social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible  complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy.  Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight  into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and  considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Writing with acute intelligence about classics like \u003ci\u003eHuckleberry Finn\u003c\/i\u003e and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such  varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American  imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and  apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our  ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more  remote.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47137944404208,"sku":"9781590175514","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781590175514_p0.jpg?v=1763802663","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781590175514","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}