A well-written theoretical look at the difficulties of postmodern government.
This fourth book by independent scholar and former member of the U.S. Foreign Service Ophuls expresses the author’s ideal vision of contemporary politics.
Political scientist Ophuls attempts to outline a rational view of nation-state politics based on the writings of thinkers such as philosopher Edmund Burke, economist John Maynard Keynes and President Thomas Jefferson. “By orienting civilization toward nonmaterial ends—toward making souls instead of consumers—we can become fully human within the bonds set by nature,” Ophuls writes. The author lays out, in 35 very brief essays, how a pattern language of polity—that is, good design criteria for a nation-state—might look with great specificity, although he doesn’t go into great detail about why they meet his standards; he also doesn’t fully develop a nature metaphor he introduces early on. That said, the author’s ideas, written in thoughtful and sometimes trenchant prose, often prove surprising: “[H]ypocrisy is the vice,” Ophuls writes, “that, in paying tribute to virtue, actually supports morality.” His support of limited government and individual liberties may seem to indicate libertarian leanings, but such a judgment might be shortsighted, given this scholarly book’s complex textures; he cautions that liberty is not license and argues for small but powerful government that can operate in limited but effective ways. Not content to stick with democratic institutions, Ophuls recommends that a nation-state should be run by a wise council of elders, who can rely on “mandarins” to carry out its dictates. People, the author argues, are a mixture of devil and angel; the only way to overcome human nature is through prudence and by taking a long view of state affairs. As he makes his arguments, Ophuls is at home quoting ecologist Wendell Berry and psychologist Carl Jung; the breadth of his sources, as well as his political schema, makes for an engaging, deep reading experience.
A well-written theoretical look at the difficulties of postmodern government.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480073166
Page Count: 132
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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