A political work that skillfully follows the threads that run from Rousseau to modern thinkers.
A survey focuses on more than 200 years of political thought about equality.
As America’s wealth gap widens and the pressure builds to finally address its legacy of racial inequality, law professor Penegar raises a timely question. Has liberty been pursued at the expense of equality, making equality the “lost twin” of liberty? “Both ideals are important enough under our existing forms and traditions of government that they should be pursued or supported together,” he suggests in his brisk and often insightful survey that ranges from Rousseau to John Rawls. But “somehow Equality has been cut off from or less favored than Liberty.” As Penegar shows, Rousseau strove “for a greater depth of equality so intrinsically linked to liberty that they will advance together or falter in comparable measure.” The two concepts got equal billing in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the founding documents of the American and French revolutions. But the word equality does not appear in the United States Constitution or the Bill of Rights and, of course, didn’t apply to the enslaved. In the mid-19th-century thoughts of Herbert Spencer, Penegar notes, equality “scarcely rises to the level of an ideal on the same plane as liberty” but “will come, when it comes, by dint of the force of social evolution.” The author deftly traces the theoretical strands up to the present day, touching on such thinkers as Henry George, who argued that financial capitalism was “destroying democracy by making economic equality impossible,” and Ronald Dworkin, who stressed that “equality does not have to bend its knee to liberty.” The book flounders a bit at times with repetitions and errors—British social reformer William Beveridge is rendered as “William Beverage.” Penegar is also occasionally given to overstatement. One wonders, for example, how much the British Labour Party’s victory in the 1945 election “extinguished a century’s worth of power arrangements favoring the traditions of land, finance and industry and the established leadership class made up of Etonians and Ox-bridge alumni” when Boris Johnson, an Old Etonian and Oxford alumnus, is now the country’s prime minister.
A political work that skillfully follows the threads that run from Rousseau to modern thinkers.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62894-422-8
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Algora Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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