A spirited vindication of classical liberalism and its notions of constitutional government. In a series of linked essays, Holmes (Political Science and Law/Univ. of Chicago; The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism, not reviewed) takes on what he sees as wrongheaded criticisms, whether from the right or the left, of three aspects of liberal democracy: constitutional constraints on majority rule; the identification of individual freedom with an absence of government involvement in civil society; and self-interest. Holmes sees these principles as necessary both for popular self-rule and for the modern welfare state. Most tellingly, he takes sharp issue with negative constitutionalism—the idea that constitutions are designed to curb the power of the sovereign. This notion is true only up to a point, Holmes counters, arguing that, when legitimated by a constitution, sovereign or executive power often increases. Though Holmes touches on the point only lightly, he suggests that the reason some right- wingers so overestimated the Soviet threat to the West was that they failed to recognize that the contentious nature of democracy was not a weakness. ``It should now be clear, for good or ill,'' he notes, ``that liberalism is one of the most effective philosophies of state building ever contrived.'' What lends particular credibility to Holmes's argument is his examination of the historical context that gave rise to elements of liberal theory, including the English Civil War, which inspired Thomas Hobbes's notions of unruly man; the 15th-century conflict between French Catholics and Huguenots that led Jean Bodin to speculate on the nature of royal sovereignty; Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine's theories of bonds among the generations; and how liberal theory is tested in such contemporary applications as welfare and abortion. Despite some puzzling gaps (e.g., little discussion of the disruptive effects of race and ethnicity), an intelligent reminder that a system of government seen as weak can be unexpectedly strong.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-226-34968-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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