Rigorous and philosophically demanding, Kronman’s book invites principled argument from every side.
A deeply nuanced view of conservatism as a disciplined guardian of traditions and institutions deserving of “attention and care.”
Forget MAGA: It has nothing to do with the conservatism of Friedrich Hayek, Edmund Burke, or Baruch Spinoza. But forget humanism as a progressive might see it, too—as an all-embracing egalitarianism, that is. Former Yale law dean Kronman picks up themes he developed in his earlier books Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan and especially The Assault on American Excellence to announce traditionalist tenets that, in their way, have a radical tinge to them. A “truer conservatism,” he writes, centers on a belief in the value of the past, of the “connection to the eternal and divine,” of honoring the dead, and of recognizing that not all things are equal: Some things are rarer and finer than others, and some people have talents and abilities that are superior to others’. The last twig is perhaps the thorniest, for, going back to the Greeks, Kronman insists that equality as the primary value “denies the ancient truth that freedom is for the sake of excellence, not the other way around.” This, he adds, does not rule out the desirability of equality of opportunity or the law; still, his view comports with the distinctly nonprogressive one that, as de Tocqueville feared, we are destined to a culture (a loaded word, that) of mediocrity in a time when “the splendid and rare” are put on a par with the everyday and shabby. Forever looking back to Aristotle, Cicero, Nietzsche, and other stalwarts, Kronman’s conservatism has points in common with libertarianism and classical liberalism, if with more emphasis—again, nuanced—on religion. Yet his traditionalism, shunning “enlightened biases,” is subtly distinct from dominant schools such as judicial originalism, which he derides: “Originalists may support conservative positions—that is debatable—but they certainly do not do so for conservative reasons.”
Rigorous and philosophically demanding, Kronman’s book invites principled argument from every side.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780300277036
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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