Friday Roundup, September 13th
- I’ve made several posts the past few weeks to Liberty Fund’s upcoming Constitution Day Symposium on federalism. Regarding this important topic, our Online Library of Liberty has the deepest bench of online resources for further reading and study. Enjoy!
- So the current Liberty Law Talk is a discussion with Eric Mack on Friedrich Hayek’s great trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty. If you haven’t yet waded into all three volumes, then this podcast is a great introduction.
- For our feature review essay this week, Richard Gamble evaluates John Lukacs’ latest effort, History and the Human Condition. Gamble observes that Lukacs’ work demands humility of the reader regarding his approach to the past:
As impressive as the quantity of Professor Lukacs’s scholarship has been, I think the magnitude of that achievement has been outweighed by the quality of his thought. I would like to be able to say that for any writer the edifice of his output stands securely on a deep foundation of thought, but how often is that the case? History and the Human Condition shows the degree to which Professor Lukacs’s body of work integrates what the historian says with how he says it and, if you pardon the abuse of a verb, how he thinks it. Sometimes directly, sometimes as an aside, sometimes tacitly, Professor Lukacs teaches his readers how they ought to think about the past. Note: not what his readers ought to think, though that of course matters, but how they think.
- Arnold Kling at EconLib on “America’s Past and America’s Future.”
- Shocked, Shocked, that the NSA has illegally accessed phone numbers and data information since the beginning of the 2006 metadata collection program.
- The “most powerful barrier” no more, Adam White on the demotic role lawyers now play in American civic life.
- Joel Kotkin on an American family feud and the future it might portend.