American Council of Learned Societies

Over the course of the twentieth-century, the primary path toward the ‘good life’ in the United States involved the purchase of a single family home in the suburbs, which promised financial security, social independence and access to a healthy environmental and verdant greenspace. But the system that developed was also built on racial exclusion and unsustainable and environmentally destructive levels of resource consumption. An examination of the spaces of the single-family home shows the challenges in creating a just and sustainable good life, as the social meaning and material realities of the system become intimately tied together. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Style is easy to dismiss but crucial to understand, and Goodman's explanation of why style matters politically is one of the reasons that I, as a specialist in Roman rhetoric and political thought, appreciate his book. The absence I see in Goodman's book haunts my own work too; I have only just begun seriously applying myself to the task of rethinking and redress.

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‘My career’, Darwin wrote towards the end of 1872, ‘is so nearly closed. … What little more I can do, shall be chiefly new work’ (letter to Francis Galton, 8 November [1872]), and the tenor of his correspondence throughout the year is one of wistful reminiscence, coupled with a keen eye to the crafting of his legacy. Bracketed by the publication in February of the sixth edition of On the origin of species, intended to be Darwin's last, and of Expression of the emotions in man and animals in November, the year marked the culmination of a programme of publication that can be traced back to his never-completed ‘big book’, Natural selection, begun in 1856. Coming hard on the heels of The descent of man and selection in relation to sex, published in 1871, these books brought a strong if deceptive sense of a job now done: Darwin intended, he declared to Alfred Russel Wallace, to see whether he could now occupy himself without writing anything more on ‘so diYcult a subject, as evolution’ (letter to A. R. Wallace, 27 July [1872]).