Book Reviews

June 17, 2019|Almost Nothing, Congress for Cultural Freedom, Eric Karpeles, Impressionism, Józef Czapski, Lost Time, Marcel Proust, Totalitarianism

Józef Czapski: A Soldier and Artist Fights for Liberty

by Priscilla M. Jensen|1 Comment

Held as a POW by the Soviets in 1940, Czapski later worked to bring to light their murder of 22,000 of his fellow Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.

June 10, 2019|Christophe Guilluy, Immigration, Twilight of the Elites

The Fracturing of France

by Guillaume de Thieulloy|2 Comments

Conflicts between the “metropolitan winners” and the “peripheral losers” are not the only social or political faultline in France.

June 3, 2019|Donald Trump, Lyceum Address, Queen Elizabeth I, Stephen Greenblatt, William Shakespeare

Was the Bard Writing about The Donald?

by Vickie B. Sullivan|14 Comments

Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s new book is a thinly veiled critique of Trump.

May 27, 2019|Alexander Hamilton, Anthony Peacock, Charles Beard, James Madison, John Jay, Martin Diamond, Publius, The Federalist, Thucydides

Refreshing and Disturbing: Anthony Peacock on Thucydides and The Federalist

by Karl Walling|2 Comments

Peacock’s rediscovery of the lost Federalist is a much needed corrective to contemporary scholarship.

May 20, 2019|Classical Liberalism, John Locke, New Testament, Old Testament, Political Hebraism, Yechiel Leiter

John Locke and Political Hebraism

by David Conway|5 Comments

Locke published the Two Treatises as a moral justification of violent resistance against tyranny—and the Hebrew Bible was vital to this endeavor.

May 13, 2019|Lord Liverpool, William Anthony Hay

Robert Jenkinson, Second Earl of Liverpool: Guarantor of Britain’s Stability in a Turbulent Time

by S.J.D. Green|1 Comment

The Victorians looked down on him. Because of William Anthony Hay’s fine biography, we have no excuse to follow suit.

May 6, 2019|Charles de Gaulle, Julian Jackson

De Gaulle, Re-Founder of French Republicanism

by Will Morrisey|Leave a Comment

The man the French consider the most important figure in their long history, with Napoleon a distant runner-up.

April 29, 2019|Keegan Callanan, Montesquieu's Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics

Correcting Our View of Montesquieu

by Will Selinger|3 Comments

He wasn’t a theorist of “liberal republicanism”; he was one of the great theorists of early modern monarchical government.

April 22, 2019|Helena Rosenblatt, Lost History of Liberalism

What Does the Word “Liberal” Mean?

by Nathan W. Schlueter|10 Comments

Helena Rosenblatt presents a Continentalized (which is to say incomplete) definition of liberalism.

April 15, 2019|International Relations, John Mearsheimer, Liberalism, Nationalism, structural realism

Structural Realism Has No Clothes

by Paul D. Miller|3 Comments

What is remarkable is that, despite decades of scholarship and change, today’s structural realists have revised or changed almost none of their views.

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