TO RENEW AMERICA
Newt Gingrich
Harper Collins, 1995, xii + 260 pp.
To Renew America conveys a vivid sense of its author’s unusual personality. But the vital core of the book lies elsewhere. In the guise of a reassertion of American values, Speaker Gingrich prescribes a thoroughly statist agenda.
THE SOUTHERN FRONT: HISTORY AND POLITICS IN THE CULTURAL WAR
Eugene D. Genovese
University of Missouri Press, 1995, x + 320 pp.
THE END OF RACISM: PRINCIPLES FOR A MULTIRACIAL SOCIETY
Dinesh D’Souza
The Free Press, 1995, xi + 724 pp.
D’Souza’s massive tome is structured by a simple message. Relations between whites and blacks in the contemporary United States are deep in crisis, but a way out exists. The crisis stems from the practices of large numbers of blacks, whose lives D’Souza describes in scathing terms that have already led to accusations of racism against him.
AUSTRIAN PHILOSOPHY: THE LEGACY OF FRANZ BRENTANO
Barry Smith
Open Court, 1994, xii + 381 pgs.
As any reader in the tradition will know, Austrian economics has deep links to philosophy. To understand the philosophical background out of which the Austrian School emerged is essential to a grasp of the School’s doctrine. Barry Smith, in his exhaustively researched and carefully argued book, has done more than any other scholar to elucidate that background.
THE NEXT AMERICAN NATION: THE NEW NATIONALISM AND THE FOURTH AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Michael Lind
The Free Press, 1995, vii + 436 pp.
Michael Lind’s book contains one excellent idea, and several well worth discussion. But these are enmeshed in a bizarre collection of arbitrary assertions. Lind thinks in pictures, and the products of his hyperactive imagination here take the place of argument.
“JAFFA ON GRAGLIA”
Harry Jaffa
National Review, Volume 47, No. 15
(August 14, 1995): 27–32
A FUTURE FOR SOCIALISM
John E. Roemer
Harvard University Press, 1994. viii + 178 pg
SIMPLE RULES FOR A COMPLEX WORLD
Richard A. Epstein
Harvard University Press, 1995. xiv + 361 pgs.
Richard Epstein’s excellent book is packed full of arguments which continually engage the reader, even if they do not always compel assent. He constructs a powerful case for a free-market social order, with a strictly limited state.
THE REVOLT OF THE ELITES AND THE BETRAYAL OF DEMOCRACY
Christopher Lasch
W.W. Norton, 1995. x + 276 pgs.
BEAUTIFUL LOSERS
Samuel Francis
University of Missouri Press, 1993. x + 237 pgs.
The heart of Samuel Francis’s brilliant criticism of contemporary American conservatism is found in his essay “The Other Side of Modernism”, included in the present collection. Most conservatives, he claims, whether libertarian or traditionalist, condemn the Left from an absolutist moral point of view.
