An immensely stimulating canter through a major segment of Western political tradition.
A bracing history of two-plus centuries of modern Western conservative thought.
A companion to his well-received Liberalism (2014), Fawcett’s latest is as readable and comprehensive as its predecessor. The author, an editor and correspondent at the Economist for more than 30 years, begins with late-18th-century thinkers Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, using them as examples, respectively, of moderate and radical conservatism. This motif—of different strands of conservatism—pervades the narrative until Fawcett ends with today’s “hard right.” While many familiar figures fill the survey, part of the narrative’s strength lies in the author’s exhumation of long-forgotten conservative thinkers, including William Mallock, Charles Hodge, August Rehberg, and F.H. Bradley, among many others. While explanation of the thinking of others is Fawcett’s strong suit, he never fails to offer criticisms of the thought and actions of those he believes warrant them. Fair toward everyone while skeptical about many, he’s alarmed by those who’ve recently joined the “rightward rush from the liberal-democratic status quo.” The narrative suffers somewhat from a lack of more information about such influential conservative thinkers as Samuel P. Huntington and Robert A. Nisbet, but the author’s broad scope and inclusivity allow him to effectively examine not only the genuine contribution of modern conservative thought, but also the unfortunate results of a variety of relevant historical currents—especially regarding the far right today. “As a left-wing liberal,” writes Fawcett, “I do not claim that this history is neutral. I trust it is objective. I have tried to avoid two standbys of political writing, celebration and caricature.” Ultimately, it’s hard to argue with the author’s concern about the recent darkening of conservatism and its surrender of the high ground of thought and action. He concludes with useful appendices on the sources of conservatism, its principal keywords and concepts, and a 60-page, detailed gazetteer of its leading figures.
An immensely stimulating canter through a major segment of Western political tradition.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-691-17410-5
Page Count: 514
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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