Why Public Reason Fails
Tradition and the Deliberative Turn: A Critique of Contemporary Democratic Theory By Ryan R. Holston. State University of New York Press, 2023. Paperback, 218 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by Gene Callahan. Political theorists have recently devoted a great amount of...
The Patterns of Living
Cities Alive: Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and the Roots of the New Urban Renaissance by Michael W. Mehaffy. Sustasis Press, 2017. Paperback, $20. Reviewed by Gene Callahan I first encountered the work of the great urban theorist Jane Jacobs due to the...
Language, Chance, and Science
The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language by John H. McWhorter. Oxford University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 208 pages, $20. Reviewed by Gene Callahan John H. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University, and a fascinating and sometimes...
The (Mis)measure of Man
The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller. Princeton University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 220 pages, $25. Reviewed by Gene Callahan One way of defining “rationalism” (when the term is understood as a flaw rather than a virtue) is that it is the attempt to replace...
"The first question, and perhaps the most pressing one when reviewing a book by @McCormickProf, is this: Even in the comparatively small world of intellectual conservatism, is there anything George isn’t doing?" - R. McKay Stangler in @ubookman
"Nonetheless, admittedly indirect evidence has been put forth, evidence which at least suggests that Hoover might have been inadvertently onto something when he successfully proposed replacing the notion of a relatively quick “panic” with something more drawn out, maybe even