Populist Experiment in Italy
Matteo Salvini of the League and Luigi Di Maio of Five Star (Vesuvio Live)Government Is Glorious
The financial crisis has weakened confidence in market economies everywhere in the Western world. Not that the United States, let alone European countries, were ever wildly deregulated; but opponents of deregulation have grown more vocal. Rethinking Capitalism, edited by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato, should actually be entitled “Rethinking Statism,” for it aims at providing interventionists with a bolder agenda than ever. Jacobs and Mazzucato basically equate limited government with a government that tries to correct market failure—an equation most libertarians would actually dispute. The failings of the world economies, whether before or after the financial crisis of late 2007 to…
Should the Thoughtful Libertarian Be Rationally Pessimistic?
In 2010, the British science writer Matt Ridley debuted as a classical liberal with his book The Rational Optimist. Ridley’s “coming out” was eventful and exciting for libertarians all over the world. A former staff writer and head of the Washington bureau of The Economist, a successful science author and, more importantly, a gifted narrator, Ridley condensed in his thick book much research and wisdom. The financial crisis appeared to many to have dispensed with free market ideas once and for all. Ridley pointed out that, to the contrary, free markets were actually producing prosperity, food, cleanliness all over the world—particularly for the world’s poor.
The Most Misunderstood Libertarian
To the surprise of many, scholarship on Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) has flourished in the last few years. A towering figure in Victorian Britain, Spencer was all but forgotten after his death. His works, which taken together form a “Synthetic Philosophy,” seemed alien to 20th century academics in an age of meticulous specialization. Also his commitment to individual liberty and (seriously) limited government has not been too common in the discipline that he helped establish, sociology. Talcott Parsons famously called him a victim of the very God he adored: evolution. Toward the end of the 20th century, however, interest in Spencer began…
Digging for Fairness in Land Use
Andro Linklater (1944-2013) was a Scottish journalist whose fame rested on frequent detours into popular history, including the acclaimed Measuring America (2002). Shortly after Linklater’s death, his last book was published. Owning the Earth bears the fascinating subtitle, “The Transforming History of Land Ownership.” This last effort of his is admirable in many ways. It turns the history of land ownership into a lively subject. Linklater frequently resorts to powerful images and insightful stories. In this historical tour de force, Tolstoy and Shakespeare are good companions, and so are the pilgrims of the Mayflower, who quickly learnt how inexpedient was their…
Austerity by Any Other Name
What is austerity? We in Europe hear this term almost every day, yet we do not really know what it means. Some may argue that we now call “austerity” what we used to call “fiscal consolidation.” However, the only thing we can be pretty sure of is that austerity is bad. Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea attempts to demonstrate just how bad it is, and how fiscal consolidation policies are more a product of ideology than of necessity. His polemical targets are economists who maintain that bringing budget deficits down does not necessarily depress demand and, more…
Portrait of the Great Liberals, on a Slant
Edmund Fawcett had a brilliant idea: telling the story of liberalism through a series of vignettes of thinkers, activists, and statesmen. Writing a popular book in the history of political thought is a rare achievement. For one thing, not everyone considers it a scintillating subject; for another, liberalism is more than thought—it was also a political movement. Fawcett, formerly a journalist at The Economist, writes a neat prose and has an eye for the curious biographical detail. Biography, as a literary genre, fits him well, and his book is like a gallery of portraits painted with ease by an able…
An Impressed People
“In 1700s, impressed seamen became second only to African slaves as the largest group of unfree laborers in the British Empire”: and yet, the appreciation of the historical reality and magnitude of impressment by the British Navy doesn’t go beyond very limited circles.
Press gangs (composed by naval officers and sailors) hit the road and used violence or its threat to recruit the necessary crewmen for British ships. Billy Budd arrived on the HMS Indomitable following this path. In Melville’s novel, and even more so in the Benjamin Britten’s opera (which spares no charge to naval discipline), Billy Budd’s complacent attitude towards his compulsory recruiting contrasts with the very nature of impressment.
This incongruousness is somehow at the heart of a remarkable book, The Evil Necessity. British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, written by Denver Brunsman, Associate Professor of History at the George Washington University.
Searching for Reform in Italy
Bill Emmott’s Good Italy, Bad Italy is a superb portrait of Italy as a country. Emmott offers to readers unfamiliar with Italian contemporary history a fascinating tour de force into the many ambiguities that made Italy at the same time a cradle of creative entrepreneurship and voluptuous joie de vivre, and a political basket-case. Mr Emmott was the editor of The Economist when that publication ran a famous cover, declaring Silvio Berlusconi “unfit” to lead Italy. That cover made Emmott the bête noire of the Italian right, and the hero of the Italian left. Coming to enjoy the status of…
