| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography. By William Lee Miller. (New York: Knopf, 2002. xvi, 515 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-375-40158-X.)

Lincoln's Virtues is an ambitious and elegant intellectual biography of Abraham Lincoln that succeeds admirably in uncovering the "moral meaning" of his life while enhancing "our understanding of Lincoln as a real human being in a real world" (pp. xii–xiii). William Lee Miller challenges a rising tide of cynicism about Lincoln's motives and methods by dissecting the political, social, and intellectual foundations that underlay his key moral judgments. Miller applies Max Weber's distinction between an "ethics of responsibility," which denies the existence of pure and absolute alternatives, and a contrasting "ethics of abstract purity," devoted to idealism and even perfection (p. 197).

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