In this brief book, or rather pamphlet in the old political, Tom Paine-ish use of that term, law professor and well-known blogger Glenn Reynolds offers some thoughts on how the class structure of the judiciary affects judicial decisions. Rather than focus on the general class divide in American society, Reynolds focuses on that divide in| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Mark Lilla’s books are all polished gems, perfectly and fluidly written, brief yet complete within the ambit Lilla sets for each of his works. This book, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, was written about a decade after the collapse of Communism. From its title, the casual browser might think it was a general attack| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
For no reason that is fully clear to me, I have always been fascinated by heresies. It matters to me what the difference between a Monothelite and a Monophysite is. Hence, I thought this book (from 1938, by the famous Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc) would survey various heresies and would explain, as its title says,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
“Liberal Fascism” is really a history book, not the book of political analysis I expected it to be. I didn’t love this book (written in 2007—apparently a 2009 version is updated to include talk about Obama), even though it’s famous among conservatives. I’m not sure why I didn’t love this book. Maybe it’s because despite| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This is a famous book, but “Bowling Alone” was not what I expected. What I expected was social commentary. What I got was social science, proving with reams of statistics what is now a commonplace, that social capital in America has eroded massively over the past several decades. Of course, that it’s a commonplace is| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Published in 2014, this book has an eerie vibe, redolent of a past that seems distant but really was just yesterday. Intertwined with gentle criticisms of Nordic foibles is an iron self-confidence that “we,” a group constantly referred to but never defined, desire above all things “modernism”: absolute equality of result and a rejection of| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Mary Eberstadt’s It’s Dangerous To Believe offers very clear analysis and very wrong recommendations. Eberstadt eloquently describes how the elite and powerful in today’s America have subscribed to a new religion, the religion of sexual autonomy without limit, and are increasingly using their immense power to punish heretics, in the form of traditional believers. But,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This is a clarifying book. In today’s Kardashian Kulture, even the well-informed, who know who Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke were, cannot generally give a cogent description of their thought, much less a point-counterpoint description of their fundamental ideas and disagreements. I know I certainly couldn’t. That is, until I read this book, which brilliantly| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Cass Sunstein has gathered an ensemble cast of today’s intellectual Davoisie to tell us, in seventeen separate essays, whether Trump is the harbinger of American structural doom, and if so, how. It is illuminating to read this book immediately after having read Glenn Reynolds’s The Judiciary’s Class War, with its distinction between the ruling Front-Row| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
[This post duplicates my review of Captain Blood, without the book-specific parts. I am cross-posting it because it fits in two categories, Reviews and Analysis.] American history is full of rebellion—the War of Independence and the Civil War, of course, but also unsuccessful smaller-scale rebellions—Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, John Brown’s assault| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
The wicked reality of Communism has, over the past twenty-five years, been deliberately erased from Western education and, more broadly, from the Western mind. This was entirely predictable. The reasons behind the erasure are not complex. The ruling classes and social tastemakers in the West at the time that Communism fell, and for decades before| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
In today’s world, discussion about morals is a lost art. In part, this is because stupidity is on display everywhere, and encouraged to be so, even though most people’s thoughts and opinions are less than worthless, as a glance at Facebook or The New York Times comment sections will tell you. More deeply, it’s because| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This book’s title is a lie, as is most of what little history it contains. I read Europe Since 1989: A History to fill in the gaps from Tony Judt’s Postwar, which ends its history around 2000. Philipp Ther’s book was published in 2014, with an English translation in 2016, and it specifically name-checks Judt’s| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
There is a scene in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, in which a character comes across a book of philosophy (Schopenhauer) and realizes in a soaring epiphany that it contains the answers to all of life’s questions. For me, this book served much the same purpose—it explained to me why certain things are the way they are| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
