Book Reviews

September 16, 2019|David Hume, Julian Simon, Karl Popper, Ming Dynasty, Song Dynasty, Stephen Davies, The Wealth Explosion, Thomas Malthus

Advent of the Modern Economy: A Panoramic View

by Alberto Mingardi|5 Comments

Stephen Davies on the institutions and power relations that were key to the formation of Western civilization.

September 9, 2019|Alasdair MacIntyre, John Finnis, Natural Law, Natural Rights

How to Defend Limited Government and the Common Good

by Nathan W. Schlueter|Leave a Comment

A Vindication of Politics helps us remember that there are as many kinds of common goods as there are kinds of human association.

September 2, 2019|culture, Michael Walzer, morality

Defending Liberalism through Thick and Thin

by Mark Blitz|Leave a Comment

Michael Walzer seeks to replace an approach to justice based on academic philosophers’ abstractions with a standpoint that respects political concreteness.

August 26, 2019|John P. McCormick, Machiavelli

A Makeover for Machiavelli

by Michelle T. Clarke|7 Comments

His true convictions have been suppressed by academics propagandizing on behalf of oligarchy, says John P. McCormick.

August 19, 2019|Aristotle, Delba Winthrop, Democracy and Political Science

Aristotle’s Investigation of the True Meaning of Citizenship

by John Hungerford|4 Comments

Delba Winthrop asks whether the political disputes depicted by Aristotle were really about first causes.

August 12, 2019|Bernhardt L. Trout, Mastery of Nature, Svetozar Y. Minkov

How Seriously Should We Take the Modern Project?

by Charles T. Rubin|3 Comments

Essays investigating the mastery of nature.

August 5, 2019|A Fool’s Errand, Albion Tourgée, Homer Plessy, Jim Crow, Justice Henry Billings Brown, Justice John Marshall Harlan, Plessy v. Ferguson, Privileges and Immunities Clause, Reconstruction, Separate, Steve Luxenberg

Segregation Setback: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson

by Sean A. Scott|4 Comments

Everyone knew that successfully overturning Jim Crow laws was a long shot. Here are the men who tried.

July 29, 2019|David Stuttard, Nemesis, treason

What Is a Traitor?: The Glorious (and Ruinous) Life of Alcibiades

by Steven Grosby|Leave a Comment

The man of contradictions whose life story was intertwined with the conflicts in Athens between democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny.

July 22, 2019|James Davison Hunter, Paul Nedelisky, Science and the Good

Why Do We Look to Science As a Guide for Living?

by Ronald W. Dworkin|4 Comments

Science-based morality makes moral “progress” impossible, if not immoral.

July 15, 2019|cyclical time, eternity, Frederick the Great, Frederick William, Germany, History, linear time, National Socialism, Otto von Bismarck, World War I

Germany, Temporal and Eternal

by William Anthony Hay|Leave a Comment

Then as now, where people stood on history and how they understood their place in the flow of time shaped their actions.

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