In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of reviews.
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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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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…
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The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, by Daniel J. Flynn. Encounter Books, 2025, 544 pages, $41.99. To the vast majority of Americans, the name Frank S. Meyer means nothing. It did to me prior to reading Daniel J. Flynn’s new biography, The Man Who Invented Conservatism. I was born in 2006, nearly a century after Meyer’s birth. My mother had not even left Cuba when he died. Yet, in reading Flynn’s detailed biography, I came to realize that I lived in his shadow’s shadow.…
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Philip Pilkington, The Collapse of Global Liberalism and the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order, Polity Press (2025), 240 pages, $22.95. When global communism collapsed a generation ago, it not only freed several hundred million people from tyranny, but also stimulated a search for the causes of the death of a system that once posed an existential threat to capitalism and liberal democracy. Academic research over the last three decades may differ on details, but a broad consensus seems to exist as to the general causes of the demise of…
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The early 2010s television series The Newsroom has not aged well, its moral earnestness about the singular vocation of the Fourth Estate having long since run aground in the era of “fake news” and politicized fact-checking. As a snapshot of American ideals during the Obama years, however, it remains memorable. Consider the famous opening scene of the first episode, where the star, Will McAvoy, a popular TV news anchor, shares the stage at Columbia University with a prominent liberal pundit and a prominent conservative pundit. Asked by a rather vapid sorority girl,…