In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of reviews.
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Gems of American History: The Lecturer’s Art, by Walter McDougall. Encounter Books, 2025, 336 pages, $32.99. It is a common observation that we Americans do not know our history. Nevertheless, we are awash in historical argument, usually of the clumsily inaccurate and politically motivated variety. Be it the comparisons to Philadelphia 1776, Munich 1938, or Selma 1965, talking heads and popular historians seek to make sense of the present or advocate for their vision of the future through hackneyed analogies that read events backward, remove context, simplify motives, and advocate…
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Good Governing: The Police Power in the American States, by Daniel B. Rodriguez. Cambridge University Press, 354 pages, $39.99. Any attorney litigating a constitutional challenge to a state statute is going to see two words in the government lawyer’s brief: “police power.” In my years as a public interest attorney, I lost count of how many adjectives counsel conjoined to that term. “Vast,” “sweeping,” and “plenary” were common. Yes, these advocates will begrudgingly admit that there are certain constitutional limits—called “rights”—to the state’s power to legislate for public health, safety,…
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Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $30.00 Abundance, the much-anticipated manifesto from the New York Times’s Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, is “dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” Beginning with a vision of the world in 2050, full of clean energy, plentiful housing, and advanced technology, they work backwards to a rallying cry for a politics that sweeps away zero-sum thinking and bureaucratic meddling in favor of…
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The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen. W.W. Norton & Company, 272 pages, $29.99 In his Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell recounts a conversation with his subject about one philosopher’s “ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal.” It’s obvious nonsense, Boswell says, to think that we are ethereal concepts, rather than corporeal beings. But can how can we ever convincingly refute the argument to the contrary? “I never shall forget,” Boswell writes, “the…