A provocative examination of social constructs and those who would alternately undo or improve them.
An excursus in the realm of the normal and normative and how we define them.
Covid-19, Donald Trump, cyberwarfare: All these are signs that things are not “normal.” But what does normality constitute? Norms, writes Harvard Law School professor Sunstein, are generally if sometimes loosely agreed upon guidelines that govern our behavior. We agree, by consensus and often by law, that one should not smoke in church or call 911 to report a leaking spigot. But what happens when a norm iconoclast comes into the picture? Among other things, the elevation of Trump to national power “weakened the social norm against supporting anti-immigrant groups,” and it freed many Americans to spout the vilest of sentiments. “When norms begin to loosen, people start to say what they actually think,” Sunstein adds, and what they think can be quite awful. Norms can be positively constructed, though. The author notes that the arrival of the pandemic has put new practices in place that forgo handshaking and promote hand-washing instead. Authoritarians can be what Sunstein calls “norm entrepreneurs,” but then again, so can the democratically minded, leading to the common situation where one person’s norm is another person’s form of oppression. Sunstein takes a long look at institutions that are meant to uphold democratic norms. In an especially inspired moment, he rejects Winston Churchill’s notion that democracy is the worst form of government save for all the others and instead upholds it at least in part because the citizenry establishes normative behavior. By virtue of that fact, norms can come and go for better (civil rights for all) or worse (cancel culture), leading Sunstein to conclude, “An appreciation of the paradox—the simultaneous power and fragility of the normal—attests to one fact above all: human beings are astonishingly resilient.”
A provocative examination of social constructs and those who would alternately undo or improve them.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-300-25350-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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