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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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