Monthly Archives: November, 2018
Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Mark Sedgwick)
This book is an academic study of an obscure movement, Traditionalism. The name has a specific meaning; it does not mean traditional forms of...
Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939 (Wolfgang Schivelbusch)
This book, a brief work of cultural history, outlines four parallel aspects of three political systems: the American New Deal, Italian Fascism, and German...
The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed (F. H. Buckley)
Along with left-wing books decrying the supposed Trump-driven decline of democracy, I have been reading right-wing books about the supposed Trump-driven realignment of politics. ...
Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance (Stephen P. Halbrook)
This is an academic monograph, rather than a work of propaganda or political inspiration. Those looking for a rabble-rousing polemic in the style of...
The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (Tim Wu)
As the ideological tectonic plates shift in America, many apparently settled matters have become unsettled. This creates, at the same time, both conflict and...
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (Laura Spinney)
Since I am an apocalypse monger, but a practical one, I do not worry about alien invasions or the reversal of Earth’s magnetic field,...
The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (Gopal Balakrishnan)
Carl Schmitt, preeminent antiliberal, is that rare thing, the modern political philosopher relevant long after his time. The simple remember him only for his...
On Conservative Bubbles and the Supreme Court
It has long been an article of faith on the Right, including for me, that the Left has undemocratically imposed its views on the...
On the Subjective Mental State of Liberals
In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked “What Is it Like to be a Bat?” Nagel rejected reductionism, the idea that all consciousness can...
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Christopher R. Browning)
It seems to me that we in the West are like men in a cavern, out of which lead many paths, none signposted. Some...