Book Reviews

Raghuram Rajan has written a surprising book calling for strengthening of the local, “proximate,” community.

How do we convince people to submit themselves to the regime or to even die for it? Convince them that the regime was founded and sustained by a breed of superhuman "statesmen" like Wilson, Lincoln, and the "Founding Fathers."

With his latest book, George Will has inched back toward his libertarian roots. But he is still far too enamored of the Tory paternalism that has long infected his work. 

The clear religious nature of progressivism that emerges is clear. The Left has found that racism is the default setting of man, and a person “is able to escape that fallen state” only through their leftish repentance.

In her history of liberalism (both classical and otherwise) Helena Rosenblatt relies on a caricature of liberals as radically individualistic and concerned only with material gain. This is an unfortunate mistake. 

Professor Jonathan Newman joins the show for a look at America's Great Depression, Rothbard's classic explanation of a terrible period in US history.  It can happen here, and it can happen again, if Rothbard's counsel goes unheard.

Scott Horton joins Jeff Deist for a sobering look at American hubris overseas, along with the blowback and destruction it causes. You don't want to miss this conversation.

Singer's Hot Talk, Cold Science is largely a skeptical scientific inquiry about popular global-warming theses. But there is one area of this that he understands is not scientific: the policy question of what, if anything, to do about climate problems.

What seems to me the great strength of Pankaj Mishra's new book is its demonstration that the atrocities of imperial conquest and rule prefigured the horrors of the European wars of the twentieth century and later wars of conquest as well.

"These days most people tend to equate freedom with the possession of inalienable individual rights, rights that demarcate a private sphere no government may infringe on. But has this always been the case?"