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  • The American Scholar

    A Lifelong Habit of Being

    Jun 01, 2020 4 minutes
    Review by Elizabeth D. Samet

    CHARACTER: The History of a Cultural Obsession

    BY MARJORIE GARBER

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp., $30

    DAYS AFTER THE 9/11 attacks, Susan Sontag noted the frequency with which the hijackers were being charged with cowardice: “[W]hatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter,” she insisted in “they were not cowards.” Sontag’s commentary outraged many readers, but her description of courage as “a morally neutral virtue” has a rich history. It finds an 18th-century analogue in Samuel Johnson’s observation that even a highwayman can manifest this quality. “We have more respect for a man who robs boldly on the highway, than for a fellow who jumps out of a ditch, and knocks you down behind your

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