It’s hard to imagine an American politician writing with the same depth and grasp of an inordinately complex subject, but...
Parliamentarian Norman (Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, 2015, etc.) enlists Adam Smith (1723-1790) and the Scottish Enlightenment in the cause of moral capitalism.
Having written of Edmund Burke as an intellectual founder of modern conservatism, the author now reckons with Smith, the great Scottish student of markets and consumer behavior. What are those markets, and what are they for? As the author notes, we don’t ask the right questions “about norms and culture and the role of the state.” Above all, the market assumes trust and consent: It cannot function well if those who are engaged in it do not trust one another and willingly enter into exchange, which, of course, is a problem in a market stained by crony and predatory stripes of capitalism, the capitalism that “flourishes where companies and markets lose their connection to the public good.” Following Smith, who wrote of the “moral sentiment” that underlies our supposedly self-interested interactions in the marketplace, Norman holds that while a free market should indeed be free, that does not mean that it should not be regulated. The playing field should be level, the barriers to entry uniform, the market a place not just of exchange, but also a moral community that hinges “on people who are not merely legally free but free in the full exercise of their capabilities.” Markets, he adds in what will be anathema to libertarians, are often improved by state intervention, especially of the sort that keeps insiders from ripping off outsiders. Following Smith again, he even endorses paying one’s taxes, though taxes must be used to public good, for “inefficient taxes increase bureaucracy, undermine the incentive to the productive, encourage smuggling and create vexation.”
It’s hard to imagine an American politician writing with the same depth and grasp of an inordinately complex subject, but Norman pulls it off quite capably. A worthy addition to the literature surrounding Smith and that of modern conservative thought.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-06197-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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