In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of reviews.
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Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism, by Alan S. Kahan (Princeton University Press, 528 pp., $29.95) Neither the coterie of right-wing intellectuals who dub themselves postliberals nor many of the defenders of the liberal tradition in its 21st century hour of need can agree on what, exactly, liberalism is. Many so-called postliberals understand liberalism as bereft of moral claims, a definition accepted by many who embrace the term today. Both sides operate on the consensus that liberalism is the brainchild of John Locke. Alan S. Kahan, an intellectual historian…
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Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, by Mary Beard (The University of Chicago Press, 208 pp., $22.50) Just like comic book superheroes and villains, every classics scholar has an origin story. I am speaking of that moment of amazement when a slightly awkward young nerd possessing high-prescription eyewear and lacking all fashion sense realizes that he wants to study something normal people blissfully ignore—maybe Roman legionary brick stamps, the Greek optative mood, or the work of a little-known ancient poet—for the rest of his life. Maybe he visited a striking…
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One of the major questions of modern historiography concerns the beginnings of “capitalism.” Well-known explanations include Karl Marx’s account of the victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal class and Max Weber’s tracing of the spirit of capitalism to the Protestant ethic. A key challenge faced by scholars is that capitalism is a rich concept that can refer to an economic system as well as a political ideology or even a worldview. The term can be used both as a neutral term of analysis and as a normative one for either…
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In 2015, Yale students confronted Nicholas Christakis, a professor at the university, over an email his wife had sent encouraging them to embrace, rather than fear, offensive Halloween costumes. A number of students were crying and one student told Christakis that a university “is not about creating an intellectual space.…It is about creating a home here.” In 2019, a Gallup survey of more than three thousand college students found that large majorities favored restricting racial slurs and stereotypical costumes. Clearly, our understanding of free speech is changing. Campus speech codes, “cancel culture,” and renewed calls – often from within the academy…
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The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, by Richard Bell (Penguin Random House, 416 pp., $35.00) Ralph Waldo Emerson, dean of the American transcendentalist poets, famously called the first shot of the American Revolution the “shot heard round the world” in his hymn for the Battle of Concord. The phrase has echoed through the ages as one of the most iconic in American history. Indeed, the entire world would come to hear the shots of the American Revolution. Not only in Concord and Yorktown, but from Gibraltar to…
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Over the past several years, long-standing frustration with an increasingly radical progressive intelligentsia has reached a political boiling point. This is evident in GOP policymakers’ novel willingness to intervene in the operations of higher education to address perceived ideological capture. Some of these measures are constructive. For instance, my own institutional home of the Salmon P. Chase Center at Ohio State is one of several centers established to expand intellectual inquiry and impart foundational knowledge of the American civic tradition. Other measures reflect darker impulses. Sweeping, ad hoc restrictions on scientific funding have disrupted fruitful research agendas,…
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When educated Christians think about “Christian social thought,” they probably have in mind the Catholic or Reformed traditions, as well as key figures such as Pope Leo XIII or theologian-turned-statesman Abraham Kuyper. The Orthodox Church, in contrast, is widely believed not to have a unified set of teachings on politics, economics, and the good society. But this belief is wrong. In The Kingdom of God and the Common Good: Orthodox Christian Social Thought, Dylan Pahman, an Orthodox Christian and researcher at the Acton Institute, has shown that Orthodoxy has something meaningful to…
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Every few years, another book arrives making the same pitch: Christians should be aligned with the left. Or at least, they should be more open to voting for Democrats. Scotty McLennan’s Jesus Was a Liberal, Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change, Tony Campolo’s Red Letter Christians, and Robin Meyers’s Saving Jesus from the Church all tread the same ground, each offering slight variations on a single theme. The Christian Right, they argue, has hijacked the faith for political gain, misread Scripture, and done real harm to both church and state—while progressive Christians have failed to mount…
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False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947, by George Selgin. University of Chicago Press, 2025, 384 pages, $35.00. As a policy regime, the New Deal remains an ingrained part of America’s political consciousness. Those confident in state action view President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression as proof that bold interventionist policies are effective, with every new crisis—such as the call for a “Green New Deal”—reviving this supposed lesson. In contrast, skeptics view Roosevelt as having pushed the United States towards European collectivism, leading…
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The American right is in a period of intellectual tumult. Part of that reckoning includes wondering what novels are and what they are for. It is impressive that we should are even talking about it. Our commercial and technological mores imply that we wouldn’t even bother to burn books—they would simply be rendered obsolete by entertainment, as well as AI. Literature faces a cultural challenge as well as a technological one: it’s about white men. One attack on the novel and novelists revolves around racism, whether it’s Mark Twain using…