“…The Romance of Real Life shows how a sensitive, prolific writer confronted, wrestled with, and ultimately promoted the emergence of a liberal society in nineteenth-century America Watts also shows how Brown's experience was central to broader developments: the rise of the novel in America, the development of gender and family formulations, the clash between republican "virtue" and liberal "self-interest," and the origins of a bourgeois creed of self-control. Perhaps most importantly, he explains how Brown helped articulate a notion of "culture" itself as a civilizing force to restrain restless liberal individualism His notoriously volatile private life, it turns out, in many ways flowed from a critique of market society and its impulses Offering a revisionist view of Brown himself, Watts examines the major novels of the 1790s as well as previously neglected sources - from early essays and private letters to late-career forays into journalism, political pamphleteering, serial fiction, and cultural criticism. …”

Tabla de Contenidos: “…Analyzing the African origins of Negro music and dance in a time of racism, fascism, and war -- Listening to Africa in the city, in the laboratory, and on record -- Embodying Africa against racial oppression, ignorance, and colonialism -- Disalienating movement and sound from the pathologies of freedom and time -- Desiring Africa, or Western civilization's discontents -- Conclusion: dance-music as rhizome…”

“…L’écho rencontré par Wilhelm Röpke illustre la renaissance des idées libérales et conservatrices dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle et le rôle majeur joué dans leur fermentation et leur diffusion par les intellectuels émigrés d’origine germanique…”