For some time now, a year, two years? the word “narrative” is more or less being continuously used by almost every journalist, reporter, commentator, politician, and critic with access to a microphone or pen.

And now another word is being similarly co-opted for its figurative punch: “brand.” So far I only hear it used by politicos; we’ll see how far it penetrates.

“The Republican brand. The Democratic brand. Obama’s brand. McCain’s brand.

Just sayin’.

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from a review of Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity on Slate.Com:

I

f you’re a philosopher, the easiest way to introduce yourself is not by elaborating a doctrine, but by telling a story. That’s because philosophical views are always arguments with previous views, and so they arise within a historical narrative. Susan Neiman is a masterly storyteller; her new book Moral Clarity offers retellings of the Odyssey and the Book of Job that are themselves worth the price of admission. But she also has stories about the origins of her own position that place her in both larger intellectual narratives and more local political ones.

Neiman, an American philosopher who runs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, worries that American progressives have drifted away from the values and intellectual traditions of the West, stretching from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment (this is the larger narrative).

Click here to read the entire review.

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