Making Tories and Whigs
The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Max Skjönsberg. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Hardcover, 350 pages, $100. Reviewed by John G. Grove The “long” eighteenth century has proven to be one of the most fertile...
The Jeffersonian Judge
Irreconcilable Founders: Spencer Roane, John Marshall, and the Nature of America’s Constitutional Republic By David Johnson. LSU Press, 2021 Hardcover, 256 pages, $45. Reviewed by John Grove There is nothing new under the sun, and that certainly applies to modern-day...
Imagined Americas
After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division by Samuel Goldman. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Hardcover, 208 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by John G. Grove In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre described a world in which moral language had lost all...
Why We Want Freedom
Freedom: An Unruly History by Annelien de Dijn. Harvard University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 432 pages, $35. Reviewed by John G. Grove Chances are, anyone who took an introductory course in political theory learned something of the difference between “positive” and...
Decades ago, Robert Nisbet anticipated many of today’s concerns about loneliness, bureaucracy, and declining community. Luke C. Sheahan (@lsheahan) revisits the ideas behind those warnings and their relevance today.
Questions about first principles have become fashionable again. @HorcherF and @DanJTPitt apply generosity to smooth contention between intellectuals and politicians, they embrace the tension between theory and practice, and they highlight the power of particularity as a source of