Government

21. Sinclair, History of New Zealand (4 Nov 2024)

by kurto

The main themes of 19th- and 20th-century history are the themes of encouraging an egalitarian society dependent on foreign trade (and primary products at that) and reconciliation among Maori and pakeha.

As much as three-fourths of NZ’s flora is unique, so long had the islands been separated. The first Europeans were traders and settlers from Australia, exporting timber from Kororakea (Bay of Islands). The Colonial Office did not wish to assume responsibility for governance; the Maori were to treated fairly – contra contemporary theories of imperialism.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield led those who saw NZ as a proto ‘dominion’, that is a tabula rasa colony, later joined by South Island pastoralists; Gordon Coates personified the philanthropic / missionary types, intending to help Maori cultural progress. Politics was pluralist, the government mainly confronting lawlessness and semi-open settler-Maori warfare. Wakefield’s New Zealand company didn’t force the Colonial Office’s hand but to the contrary, established beachheads knowing of London’s intent. The first governor-general was instructed to moderate Australian settlers and protect Maori largely by guaranteeing land rights: all European title was to come via crown grants, since the crown assigned itself a monopoly on buying from Maori. This view that the land belonged to the locals was different from commerce with the American Indian, Australian aborigine, or South African bantu, the author notes. The Maori tribes began a loose amalgamation.

1840’s Treaty of Waitangi sought to codify bicultural relations. Thereafter governor George Grey established order among competing interests, shaping the balance of the 19th century. The constitution of 1852 was highly democratic; lands were purchased for settlers; and Maori subdued along the road from Auckland to Hamilton and in the Waitara. Thus the country’s socioeconomic character was formed in its infancy: paternalist government, concern for Maori, and focus on primary production. Of the six provinces given in the constitution, five were NZC (Wakefieldian) settlements; most settlers were from London or the Home counties not Australia, though the 1861 gold rush in Otago brought in 65,000, mostly Aussie. (In the 1960s, it was still possible to hear the Kiwi accent in Essex.) Most were working class concerned to surmount poverty or some social predicament. A New Zealand-born mentality was already forming, the North Island characterized race relations and commerce with the UK, the south, more exclusively pakeha, concerned with sheep grazing as well as outgrowths of the gold rush. There was predictable struggle between the central government (as a proxy for the poorer provinces) and the well-to-do (South) provinces. Wellington was made capital in 1865, after it seemed Maori warfare had peaked.

The decisive moment had been the fall of ‘King country’ strongholds in 1863. Though Maori tribes controlled large sections of the North Island all the way to Napier, they never opted for a broad guerrilla was but only tradition defensive fortification (pa), and of course weaponry was no match; however, the British regulars thought the Maori their toughest colonial foe. After the final battle in Orakau, just south of Hamilton, some 3 million acres was confiscated in Waikato, the East coast, and Taranaki – prime lands rather than punitive confiscation – unfairly and the worst example of colonial mismanagement, the author suggests. But if the conflict was actually a civil war (as now characterized), then would not the losing side expect to suffer losses? Among the Maori, the Hau Hau religion sprang up.

In the 1870s-80s, Julius Vogel promoted growth via borrowing from London investors. The population doubled, railways and telegraphs were built, and pakeha landownership quadrupled. Government spending per capita was 13 times the rate of Canada, surpassing Victoria and New South Wales on a gross basis. In something like the American election of 1828, the Liberals came to power in 1890, marking the decline of southern pastoralists, the colonial gentry. The party taxed land rents, and toyed with the idea of owning all the land. Dick Seddon ruled over 1893 to 1906, which era brought in the women’s vote, mandatory arbitration for labor unions, and easy loans to buy land amid continuing dispute over freehold versus leasehold. The radicality of 1890 settled into paternalism. Labor came to be dissatisfied with arbitration, and the country grew weary of Seddon’s rule, leading conservatives to establish the Reform Party while the leftists became Labour (the ‘Red Feds’). As in Britain, the centrists eventually died off.

At the turn of the century, NZ decided not to join federal Australia as being too far awas and for lack of a common sensibility, though the Kiwis sought to retain an option to later join. Reform came to power in 1912, simultaneous with the political ascendancy of Northern small farming and diary interests (the ‘cow cockies’). As in Australia, Gallipoli and World War I marked the turning point of British colonists into Pacific islanders. Postwar soldiers were encouraged to buy farms: veterans and speculators roamed the countryside, resulting in nearly half the land changing hands. The three-party balance was unstable, Reform first among relative equals. Exports led by meat, wool, butter, and cheese (which in 1980 still comprised 50 percent of trade) were the highest per capita in the world. Foreign debt grew: in 1933, nearly 40 percent of government expenditure was on interest. New Zealanders understood themselves to have a high standard of living.

In the downturn, labor radicalism was easier to effect than in the US or Australia – which is seen as influencing Labour’s 1935 electoral win. The left wished to ‘insulate’ the country from the world economy, questionable for a trading nation. World War II again propelled centralization. By 1949 social services reached one-third of spending, up from 20 percent in 1928, growth mainly coming from eliminating means testing of family benefits, which increasing the welfare roster to 230,000 from 45,000. Government policies sought for equality of outcomes.

The postwar economic grew apace with the west; communist-inspired labor strife dominated the cities; the countryside and South Island remains pastoral and agricultural. The government sought to implement autarchic industrial growth in steel and liquid natural gas, with limited success. In the late 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands emigrated: the population actually fell in 1978. From 1984, the country like Australia veered from excessive statism, Rogernomics lowered income rates and introduced a value-added tax.

Though the government took radical steps in the slumps of 1891-98 and 1936-38 and otherwise centralized, the people are temperamentally conservative. Wealth carries no prerogative of leadership, and politics mostly centers on economic development to pay for education, health, and pensions, such beneficence stemming from missionary humanitarianism as well as 19th-century utilitarianism. Sinclair writes redistribution is the more possible because of the country’s small size. The matters of biracial society are important but subsumed under equality of outcomes, achieved through government mandate.

New Zealand belongs to a ‘pacific triangle’ formed by Auckland, Sydney, and San Francisco: Kiwis are not a ‘better British’ but a bicultural, Pacific Ocean people – albeit more British than the Aussies (against whom they define themselves) or Americans (never quite forgotten as colonial brethren). Questions of identify are more pronounced in the South Island, the northerners having the stronger Maori influence and balance of population.

20. Baker and Glassner, Man Who Ran Washington (13 October 2024)

by kurto

The career of Jim Baker, a corporate lawyer from an upper-crust Houston family, epitomizes a bygone era of Washington DC dealmaking, crowned by his successful tenure as Secretary of State during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Baker, who chafed at his campaign director and chief of staff roles, premised authority on power not wisdom as well as skill in sidestepping responsibility, with legal know-how acting as guarantor. The approach falters when the fundamental questions stretch the paradigm, in Baker’s case, the Baby Boom-era welfare state politics and Cold War arms control. Despite the authors’ frequent contention that dealmaking is out of fashion, Baker’s successor is Obama, the president himself the knife fighter.

A product of Princeton-as-finishing school, he turned to politics not because of his first wife’s death but from weariness with corporate law. His second marriage made for tempestuous family life. Still, over the 10 years from age 48 to 58 he soared from an outsider to Secretary of Treasury and then State, Nixon’s resignation having opened the way. Baker’s modus vivendi was to leak but not lie to the media; to keep a file of unethical requests; as negotiator, to allow the opposite side to show concerns had been expressed, without conceding the substance of his position. He used ‘double option’ positions to take credit or disavow the outcome. No permanent enemies, but equally no clear mechanism for driving consensus; there are compromises with Democrats but fewer examples of conciliating Republicans. Quayle, Rumsfeld, and Cheney are exemplars of conservatism. Buckley is said to be an eminence grise.

Baker preserved Social Security, and is credited with Canadian free trade by Mulroney. He was the first American leader to accept Chinese tyranny as concomitant with economic growth, and responsible for Willie Horton campaigning. His great rival was Henry Kissinger, the strategist being a very different prototype to the dealmaker. Nixon thought him prone to illustory international consensus. Thatcher thought his decision making average, e.g., allowing Germany to come together without any concern for proto-European Union (given Merkel, was she wrong?). He ended his days trading on influence, rallying to put the second Bush in the presidency.

Where is the line between duplicity and personal honor? He didn’t waste time on guilt over Machiavellian moves, according to his wife. The authors recur to the theme of Baker being out for himself, e.g., as Reagan’s chief, versus Bush’s consigliere; Nancy Reagan is said to have been pleased, Barbara Bush unhappy.

Well sourced, though from a historiographic perspective, the authors tend to describe characters as they would be remembered, rather than contemporaneously viewed (e.g., Oregon senator Bob Packwood). Reagan ‘stoked division’ by campaigning on welfare queens, apartheid was failing in 1992, left-liberal homogeneity pervades.

17. Klein and Pinos, ed., Burke (30 July 2024)

by kurto

A compilation of passages focused on the French Revolution, statesmanship, and neo-political thought. Burke estimated contemporary Britain (circa 1795) had 400,000 informed citizens, from among a population of 10 million, of whom 80,000 favored the French Revolution. The editors contend radical is natural to man, to be countered by training and education. Burke’s writings tend to confirm O’Brien’s view that he most of all opposed tyranny, that he changed his stance but never his ground. Of note:

• Revolution is the last thought (‘resource’) of the thoughtful
• Prejudice (learned inclination) is trusted and ready in an emergency
• England would never ‘call in an enemy to the substance of any systems to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its constitution’ (p. 45)
• The press naturally become demagogues against wealth and merit
• ‘Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of members but not for their punishment’ (p. 61)
• Plans benefit from observations of those whose understand is inferior, as a sanity check (p. 75)
• Revolutionary persecution unifies the opposite evils of intolerance and indifference – against all conscience. Moral sentiments, connected with ‘early prejudice’, cannot live long under nihilist regimes
• The foundation of government is not in theoretical rights of man (‘a confusion of judicial with civil principles’) but in convenience and nature – that is, either universal or local modification
• Men often mistakenly feel courage produces danger, rather than the obvious opposite
• When reason of state prohibits disclosure, silence is manly
• The possession of power discloses the true character of a man

7. Scruton, England: An Elegy (2 March 2024)

by kurto

England’s 20th-century decline owes to abandoning the wisdom of culture and custom derived from the countryside, common law, and the softening of power into authority. Classical Albion was a society of people desiring of privacy who could nonetheless be relied upon to act benevolently – strangers but never foes. Governed not from above (i.e., by class) but within (self-regulating order but around shared experience and compromise), it collapsed after World II not through antiquated education and honor but because English politics and law work only in English society, through reason not rationality and compromise. Urban development, homogeneity, and Continental rationality (e.g., Roman law and EU promulgations) broke the spell of enchantment.

Law and government:
Common law developed along the lines of Kant’s view that the moral law known to all rational beings, even if not all could explain it. The point was to do justice in the individual case, regardless of interests of power or cohesive rationality. Legal proceedings were primarily discovery, not invention: what was to be discovered is the solution to the case, not the law of the land. The object was not to exercise power over people but to give people relief from abusive power.
Rights were ancient prerogatives of the people, effected by custom not granted by government. Individuals possessed rights only because they were also burdened by duties, in contrast with European positive rights granted by government. Trusteeship in law (Burke’s partnership), along with trial by jury (of peers) and the common law itself, were characteristic features enabling disinterested husbandry of shared assets particularly over time.

The English cared less for the origins of the monarch than monarch’s commitment to upholding the law of the country; Protestantism was merely an exponent of lawfulness and custom. Whereas the Local Government act of 1888 eroded local interests and identity, while centralizing and corrupting authority.

When confronting power, the English questioned whatever and whenever no authority was evident, for possessing power does not entitle or recommend its exercise. England had never suffered Weber’s transition from traditional to legal-rational forms of authority. The attitude toward officialdom was: it it’s needs doing, you yourself should. So long as government service is an honor, it will attract the best minds; but it is merely a well-paid lifestyle, it degrades to power.
Imperialism’s worst crimes were committed against the Irish, during the Interregnum when politics was self-righteous, not compromising. But though the English emerged from World War II morally exhausted, no longer willing to cultivate its inheritance – to bear duties as well as rights – and to stave off its enervating critics, it didn’t think to compare its record with its Continental peers or previous empires. As Tocqueville observed, revolutionary sentiment is not borne of oppression but weakness of the old order.

The harmonization of law discovered not promulgated, the monarch as a corporation sole representing the people, and a religion tenuous but uniting was a settlement, an enchantment – Burke’s making the country lovely to its inhabitants. The key to government is not democracy but representation of the people’s interests, which requires compromise as well as solutions across generations; the political system must intend to amplify authority while restricting power.

Society and culture:
Hume thought the mind comprised of sensations, and the soul an illusion. If so, then a propos of Thatcher, so too must society be a collection of individuals.
English honor could be extended throughout society because the trust of behaving rightly did not require intimacy – it worked among strangers – and the test of virtue was in moments of real difficulty or danger, or when no one was looking. England did not turn on Mediterranean honor and kinship but honesty, fair play, and rule of law. The primary objective in morality is to act rightly in the circumstance, not to expound the principles which color one’s view of right, even / especially when principles are elusive or obscure. This was Austen’s genius to show. The gentleman was defined by manners, culture, virtue, aloofness but independent of lineage and wealth; and could be trusted to behave rightly without reducing the distance between him and you. Class worked to advance the body politic’s social objectives and aspirations. Amongst the working class, society was not a prison but a maze potentially leading to the way out. Disquiet over immigration is not ipso facto racism but the loss of a sense of home, disrupted to what end? When your primary loyalty is locality, EU or global sovereignty acts to create a crisis of identity.
Shakespeare presented England as enchanted by ethics, justice, law, authority; and always the ideal was presented as the possibility of restoration. England simultaneously believed the sacred to be a human construct, and that some things really are sacred.

The Anglican Church was a settlement, an attempt at peace, molding Christian belief to English idiosyncrasies, thereby enabling the binding of strangers. Once synthesis was achieved, doctrine became a social benefit, a transmitter of shared ethics. The people became a corporate person. Religion was a close ally of law, government, and social institutions. Contra Linda Colley, the English understood Protestantism in terms of nationality, not nationality in terms of Protestantism.
English art and literature were premised on place, demonstrating internalization of mystified (sacralized) topography. Burke in Sublime: nature is mysterious, is internalized by imagination (not rationally deducted). (Hedges were not total enclosures but permitted continuance of footpaths.) Where the French were more concerned with rural privations than fulfillments and contentments, the English gentlemen sought not to spend their money in London but in their country seats. The countryside’s decline reduced his stature, as did the abolition of hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

English money was not rational and meant to be added, but traditional and meant to be divided, shared. Imperial and metric diction is evidence of reasonable versus rational; the English system was the product of what works in life.

English empiricism rejected the need to rationalize everything – reason can never explain morality, politics, religion, and so on a priori. Negotiation, compromise, deference to tradition are valid, helpful contributors, the latter often likely to contain the essence of things. Empiricist philosophy, allied to common law reasoning (discovery of the ancient and the essential) and parliamentary government, were expressed in the ‘concrete vocabulary and compromising syntax’ of the language.
(Relevance in education is chimerical: who can guess the student’s interests in 10, 20, 40 years? So the standard is excellent and extent of current knowledge.)

What was the apex of Scruton’s England? Were its core elements synchronized or did they separately peak? Probably he would have chosen somewhere between the Georgian and early mid Victorian eras; although Brexit would likely have been welcome. Corelli Barnett emerges as Scruton’s principal opponent for misdiagnosing the cause of England’s decline.

20. O’Brien, Anglo-Irish Politics in the Age of Grattan and Pitt (7 October 2023)

by kurto

A Namierite survey of Protestant Ascendancy politics in the Irish Parliament during the 1780s-90s, well sourced of contemporary correspondence but sometimes forced and lacking fluid narrative. The Act of Union came because English hopes of rowing back political rights in exchange for economic concessions foundered on Anglo-Irish sense interdependence.

1691’s Treaty of Limerick established the basis of unstable 17th-centry politics. William of Orange had come to Ireland to defeat Jacobites not Catholics, but the Irish missed the distinction. Almost immediately Protestants saw London (i.e., Westminster) as working at contrary purposes. But the locals were willing to accept venality, and both the Irish and (less often) English privy councils altered or pocketed Parliamentary legislation sent for formal assent. In Anne’s reign the English Commons rescinded all Parliament land grants. Further grievances rose in limiting wool exports, coinage, Poynings Law (permitting legislative alterations), and 1719’s Declaratory Act (direct legislative authority, less often used than Poynings).

In 1770 Townshend sidelined Ireland’s ‘undertakers’ to concentrate power in the Castle, converting Anglo-Irish to opposition, thereby entrenching personal rivalries in the political process and also opening the route to 1782. This change surpassed the influence of the contemporary American rebellion, the author asserts; Irish protest literature was present out of doors but never played much role in Parliament (contra Bailyn’s Origins). Constitutional revisions commenced in 1779 with economic issues: more complete legislative freedom was seen to safeguard free trade. Charles Francis Sheridan was the ideological paladin, echoing Locke, essentially arguing the Anglo-Irish were a separate nation. Henry Grattan assumed Parliamentary leadership from Barry Yelverton, besting Henry Flood. There was no coordination among Irish and English Whigs. The opposition sought repeal of the Test Act, of Poynings, restoration of habeus corpus, independent judges (in the House of Lords), control of the exchequer, and domestic use of hereditary revenue (essentially land tax of absentee owners, tantamount to taxation without representation). These demands were supported by the paramilitary Volunteers.

(In correspondence, Burke described Grattan as a madman to be stopped?)

The Renunciation Act of 1783 shifted power to Ireland, but not through Parliamentary success or incipient rebellion. In making concessions, the Castle disregarded settled policy and the Cabinet, and Shelburne mismanaged the dysfunction. Upon taking office, Pitt sought to barter improved economic terms for reduced sovereignty. More broadly, he first sought to link national debts – the Irish were to pay for their administrative costs – and saw Irish trade demands as claims to sell colonial produce to the mother country: he did not see the claim to autonomy within the empire. His cabinet colleague Jenkinson saw Ireland as more equivalent to English towns, and helped re-turn Pitt from Adam Smith to mercantilism. These commercial propositions as well as the Regency affair were inconclusive.
Grattan refused the Castle in April 1782, as the nexus of power was then between the Irish parliament and British cabinet, the Castle being an executive agency. Yet there was no cohesion among the opposition. Country independents were regularly bought, the pensions list growing and growing in the 1780s. The Patriots were doomed to permanent opposition. Losing Corry to the Castle in 1788 handed the Parliamentary reigns to Grattan but he failed to capitalize on the febrile environment of February-March 1789; he too would later cross over.

In the 1790s the Lord Lieutenants transformed what had been ‘elitist insurrection’ into violent peasant uprisings by the Volunteers and Whiteboys. Pitt continued to see that commercial concessions would alleviate conditions. But his Irish reform policy was really an effort to reform the English legislature(?). Thus 1782 had not only separated the combatants but also increased the cost of patronage, and some in the cabinet immediately saw the failure to redress Irish concessions meant the Act of Union must follow: it was the product of exhaustion not evolution. 1800 having sidelined the Anglo-Irish, 1829’s Catholic Emancipation then removed the final barrier – the conflict became Catholics versus the Cabinet.

O’Brien’s choppy narrative itself undermines efforts to show political outcomes were pre-determined by class, as demonstrated by counting votes. Though he frequently (and admirably) cites correspondence, his Namierite approach seems likely to be masking problem and nuance.

6. Will, Conservative Sensibility (15 April 2022)

by kurto

Contemporary American political debate comprises an argument between Madisonian conservativism and Wilsonian progressivism. To be conservative is to adhere to the Founders’ classical liberalism, to individualism borne of pre-government natural rights and the spontaneous social order which emerges. The core of its endeavor is promoting political and socioeconomic practices which promote virtuous living. More specifically, the political objective is to restore government based on natural rights, which imply limited government because these rights predate government, which exists to secure those rights. Conservatism faces three core problems: family disintegration, unfunded social benefits, and corrupt political culture, especially in Washington DC.

Since the Enlightenment, the West’s primary political problem has been the tension between self-assertion and self-control. In a plural society, government focuses on minimum moral essentials which can be described as empathy and self-control. Reasoning about the proper use of freedom is liberty in practice. By 1770, the colonials came to see individual rights not a originating in English common law but natural law: Madison wrote the Revolution was only a consequent of changed attitudes over 1760-75. The American project is exceptional in being free of feudal remnants, religion, or aristocracy, in stemming not from social theory but personal liberty – not what government should do, but what it must not do; this American sense of conservativism is incidentally opposed to the UK / continental traditions of duty and hierarchy. The Founding is one of history’s most extraordinary feats of political culture, made possible by general deference to excellence in public life, brought together in Philadelphia. Moreover, founding America on Madison interests was prudent; everyone has them, whereas virtues are difficult to acquire, agree, and sustain.

A society which values individualism expects unequal distribution of rewards. The more complex the society, the more government should defer to spontaneous order. Political economy was shortened to economy at the behest of social scientists touting rigor, yet the core remains allocation of scarce resources. Hayek asserted society advances by the functions it can perform without thinking (i.e., reflexively), contra JS Mill; government is an unequal and corruptible judge. Thus society’s economic regulator is pricing. Whereas JK Galbraith in the Affluent Society saw consumer desires as manufactured by corporate marketing, undermining respect for market equilibria. The effect is to reverse Burke’s view of government’s existing to deal with social wants; government can stimulate wants which it will be duly rewarded for providing. Inequality is not inherently injurious provided there is sufficiency (adequate resources).

Progressives attack individualism, reversing the view of rights preceding government. The democratic (majority) will is the manifestation of liberty; government’s antecedent job is shaping appetites, a European view which conflicts with the Lockean view of natural sociability. Progressivism holds human nature is plastic, is a product of shaping social forces, always becoming and therefore susceptible to steerage (which Will sometimes idiosyncratically calls historicism). Borne of Rousseau, this view is the more man is stripped of his own resources (i.e., of his nature), the greater the government’s possibilities – the very basis of 20th-century totalitarianism. It is Roman, government-made law with no limiting principle. Progressivism’s core text is Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which aside from asserting the economically determined views of the contemporary politicians, disparages judicial review, and its worldview follows Thomas Dewey’s results-oriented pragmatism. The contrast is cooperative order versus top-down social engineering. Paradoxically, though Progressivism sees no individual human nature, groups (races) possess them. Also, Progressivism feel plural society should not be allowed to carry core cultural views from generation to generation, that is, it is intentionally historicist. The modern presidency is the agent of Progressivism, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (who held that checks and balances are absurd) and then to Lyndon Johnson.

Modern Americans talk like Jefferson (‘wise and frugal government’) and vote like Hamiltonians. In contemporary America, 35% of receive means-tested benefits including 50% of blacks and Hispanics; in 1960 the ratio of disabled to employed was 1 in 134, today it’s 1 in 16. Dependency should not be a political right. Conservativism seeks an equilibrium. Human nature makes political claims; government inevitably has a nurturing role, borne of the virtuous qualities, which Will sees as a popular government’s continuing task of education. (Statecraft as Soulcraft was not a prescription but an observation of what government inevitably does: whether to secure individual rights or shape collective outcomes? Will declares he was wrong upon 1983’s publication that the Founders paid too little attention to civic virtues: everyday capitalism promotes good habits such as honesty, politeness which are implicitly virtues.) Virtually the whole of contemporary government has become a corrupting force in a Tocquevillian vein, degrading without tormenting.

Congress must reassert itself via less delegation to administrative bodies, and the judiciary led by the Supreme Court should insist on separation of powers. In the latter 20th century, government services were increasingly less connected with elected officials and more to semi-permanent bureaucrats. In 2016, Congress passed 3,000 pages of legislation, against 97,000 pages of administrative law enrolled in the Federal register, an example of legislative delegation to executive agencies such as the Consumer Protection Bureau – which dangerously funds itself. Congressional atrophy is executive branch hypertrophy. (An aside: stripping the states’ rights to appoint senators (in 1913’s 17th amendment) served to make states administrative extensions of Congress and senators more responsive to Washington.)

Only the courts can preserve constitutional order against the general will. Originalism is meant to defend a fundamental understanding; judicial restraint does not equal securing rights but only deference to majoritarianism. The US constitution specifies not democracy but federated republic. Its fixed purpose is to protect natural rights in changing circumstances. Contra Oliver Holmes, there is no right of majority to embody opinions in laws. Lochner wrongly sought to establish government’s right to prescribe contracts (Bork is majoritarian?); the due process clause should prohibit arbitrary government actions which restrict individual rights.

America’s problem is not wealth determining political power but the opposite. The Depression accelerated America’s dependence on government; the postwar era (including educational subsidies) renewed social confidence; the civil rights movement reinvigorated federal centrality. The New Deal’s break with Liberalism was abandoning the idea that society produces most elements of happiness: instead, government has a duty to provide. Providing for nebulous insecurity added emotional needs and established a permanent tension in the dynamics of free, capitalist society.

Americans are less likely to believe in the destiny of bleak social forces because they embrace individualism. Most Americans are not only patriots who love their country but also nationalists who feel their system is better. Progressives, notably Barack Obama!, disagree.

Pessimism is a check on scientific fatalism, a realistic opposition to prescribed outcomes, a revolt against passive role in predetermined events, a clarifying of what we can and cannot do. Freedom is not universally defined all countries, let alone universally understood relative to other political goods (equality, social cohesion). Totalitarianism rises from claims to certain understandings of history and the necessity of untrammeled action. Hannah Arendt forecast ideology plus bureaucratic social control would produce new, irresistible tyranny, but she admitted the 1956 Hungarian rebellion showed human nature was unchanging in its thirst for liberty.
Religion is helpful to but not necessary for American Conservatism. Christians should be wary of government which goes beyond defending individual rights, because Christianity is concerned with dignity of the individual. Locke said most need religion as a shortcut to wisdom; Christianity was certainly central to the Founders who observed the imperfectability of human nature, that original sin does not vitiate individual dignity, and there are universal moral truths. But the author’s overstates agnosticism as if to demonstrate realism.

Who will want to attend the postmodern university if everything is open to reinterpretation? Why devote scarce resources to obsessing race, sex, class?
Will is at his best identifying the contrasts of Conservativism and Progressivism, and the addition of Hayekian views of spontaneous socioeconomic order are helpful; yet his somewhat idiosyncratic in his views of religion, historicism. While immensely learned, the book should have condensed (or several books): too often it’s a clip job.

***16. Cannadine, Mellon (15 Dec 2007)

by kurto

An exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) biography of an oligarchic, reticent banker who became an admired Treasury secretary, until the Great Depression turned the tables on the socioeconomic assumptions he had lived by. Mellon, whose father was an austere, Scotch-Irish magnate of western Pennsylvania, grew very wealthy by financing vertical businesses in heavy industries as well as banking. Mellon fils expanded into chemicals, electricity, and oil, extending the Judge’s model. He was, however, emotionally stunted and his marriage a disaster. In Washington, he should have left after the end of the Coolidge administration (his second); not only did the Hoover era end badly, but Roosevelt deliberately pressed trumped-up (and sensationally dismissed) tax fraud charges. Notwithstanding, Mellon saw fit to donate the whole of his grand art collection as well as build the National Gallery to his country (and adopted city). Fine scholarship.

3. Kamen, Spain 1492-1763 (26 Feb 2012)

by kurto

Surveys Spain’s imperial era from the consolidation of Castilian power to the end of Anglo-French warfare. Not military conquest but adventurers, cooperative provincial elites, and Latin American coin fueled the global structure. Italy (Spanish Lombardy, based in Milan) provided crucial banking, armaments, and manpower. Spanish never became lingua franca; despite the civilizing mission of Catholicism, Castile’s elites remained intellectually and culturally insulated; and Europe did not look up to the peninsula. Power crested in 1635 and turned to France, which ‘took over’ in 1702 upon a Bourbon succeeding a Habsburg on the Spanish throne (prompting the War of Spanish Succession). Little interested in narrative politics and more attracted to sociocultural phenomena, the learned book grows dull in sections that dwell on Filipino and Ibero-American anthropology.

11. Wright, France in Modern Times (29 Sep 2012)

by kurto

Surveys the leading events and historiography of France from the mid 18th century. Far more than England or Germany, French society and government passed through radically distinct phases, and yet inevitably retained pronounced features of previous periods. As such, the royalist-republican duality reconstitutes itself in clashes such as the catholic-statist Dreyfus affair. Although it is not his intention, the author regrettably avoids taking sides: the narrative is strictly chronological. Also, there’s no mention of the things which are distinctly French, or the dichotomy of Descartes and Pascal (reason or revelation).

13. Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (20 Oct 2012)

by kurto

Demonstrates the Athenian statesman’s commitment to popular (democratic) governance in the face of monarchical and (uber)aristocratic tradition as well as the Peloponnesian War’s tribulations. As summarized by Thucydides, his leadership aspired ‘to know what must be done and to be able to explain it, to love one’s country, and to be incorruptible’. His successes are portrayed against the backdrop of the Athenian empire and regional conflagration, which broke both the city’s power and its experiment with representative government. As so often with Kagan, the bygone era’s realities are comprehensible to the modern reader.