The Quest for Neutral Ground

The Quest for Neutral Ground

The Age of Selfies: Reasoning About Rights When the Stakes Are Personal by Adam J. MacLeod. Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. Paper, 141 pgs, $25. Reviewed by Allen Mendenhall Salma Hayek makes headlines each time she posts a selfie on Instagram. I know this because...
Competition Is Beautiful

Competition Is Beautiful

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn. Wiley, 2018. Hardcover, 320 pages, $28. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel South Park is an underrated resource of American political science. One particular episode shows our...
Toward a Renewal of Europe

Toward a Renewal of Europe

Renovatio Europae: For a Hesperialist Renewal of Europe Edited by David Engels. Groningen: Blue Tiger Media, 2019. Hardcover, €19.50. Reviewed by Scott B. Nelson As always, Europe is in crisis. Some lament the European Union’s longstanding democratic deficit. Others...
James Burnham and the Asia-Pacific: 1941–1978

James Burnham and the Asia-Pacific: 1941–1978

By Francis P. Sempa James Burnham (1905–1987) was an American political philosopher and public intellectual who traveled the intellectual journey from Marxism (the Trotskyite version) to conservatism. When he broke with Marxism in the late 1930s, he began writing for...
England’s Real-Time Wendell Berry

England’s Real-Time Wendell Berry

At the Field’s Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside By Richard Hawking. The Crowood Press, 2019. Hardcover, 222 pages, $45. Reviewed by Robert Grano The name Adrian Bell will be unfamiliar to the great majority of American readers, and even in his native...
For Faith, not Power

For Faith, not Power

Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash that Shaped the Middle East by Fawaz A. Gerges. Princeton University Press, 2019. Paperback, 528 pages, $19.95 Reviewed by Fitzroy Morrissey One would be hard pressed to find two more iconic figures in the history of...
Failures of Interpretation

Failures of Interpretation

What Was Literary Impressionism? by Michael Fried. Harvard University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 408 pages, $46.50. Reviewed by Gregory Castle Impressionism arose in late-nineteenth century European and American literary art in response to a crisis in interpretation, a...
Rethinking Association

Rethinking Association

Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism by Luke C. Sheahan. University Press of Kansas, 2020. Hardcover, 227 pages, $35. Reviewed by Bruce P. Frohnen On one level Luke Sheahan’s excellent book is a practical, lawyerly brief aiming to correct a...
A Mind-Body Problem in Chinese Philosophy?

A Mind-Body Problem in Chinese Philosophy?

Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism by Edward Slingerland. Oxford University Press, 2019. Cloth, xi + 385 pages, $35. Reviewed by Jason Morgan When Scottish missionary James Legge (1815–1897) translated, partly under the auspices of...
The Sources of Russian Aggression

The Sources of Russian Aggression

Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest by Angela Stent. Twelve, 2019. Hardcover, 448 pages, $30. Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy by Anders Åslund. Yale University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $35. Reviewed...