Looking up at the towering, massive, early twentieth-century skyscraper that is the Municipal Building, I saw the names of my beloved city carved in Roman letters in a continuous line in blocks of stone: NEW AMSTERDAM MDCXXVI / MANAHATTA / NEW YORK MDCLXIV. Manahatta--what a beautiful name, I thought, so much more lyrical than New Amsterdam or New York or our present-day Manhattan, a name so lyrical that Whitman had written a lovely ode to it:

John Ruskin: The Later Years by Tim Hilton (Yale University Press, 656 pp., $35)

Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy by Stephen L. Carter (Basic Books, 338 pp., $25)

The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses

Edited by Robert McAfee Brown

(Yale University Press, 264pp., $19.95)

Americans, from William James to Jimmy Carter, have been searching for a “moral equivalent to war”: some commitment to high purpose which benefits mankind yet evokes the same degree of discipline and self-sacrifice that war does. Because the vision of such a state is so attractive it has figured rhetorically in the expressions of many presidents, most notably Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Mr. Carter.