Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–2008, by Thomas Nagel
Mises Review 15, No. 3 (Fall 2009)
SECULAR PHILOSOPHY AND THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT: ESSAYS 2002–2008
Thomas Nagel
Oxford, 2010, 171 pgs.
SECULAR PHILOSOPHY AND THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT: ESSAYS 2002–2008
Thomas Nagel
Oxford, 2010, 171 pgs.
VICTOR’S JUSTICE: FROM NUREMBERG TO BAGHDAD
Danilo Zolo
Verso, 2009, xiii + 189 pgs.
One way to look at war likens it to domestic crime. If it is wrong for someone to initiate force against a person who has not violated rights, why should matters change when a group of people, acting under the command of a nation’s leader, invade the territory of another country?
WHY NOT SOCIALISM?
G.A. Cohen
Princeton University Press, 2009, 83 pgs.
LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
Paul A. Cantor and Stephen Cox
Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009, xviii + 510 pgs.
The contributors to this outstanding collection of essays propose a revolution in literary criticism — a revolution, moreover, that has as its heart the application of Austrian economics. At first sight, the project appears paradoxical: what has Austrian economics to do with literature?
BOMB POWER: THE MODERN PRESIDENCY AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
Garry Wills
Penguin Press, 2010, 278 pgs.
MORALITY, POLITICAL ECONOMY, AND AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONALISM
Timothy P. Roth
Edward Elgar, 2007, x + 194 pgs.
Timothy Roth has in earlier work offered a penetrating criticism of modern welfare economics.[1] In Morality, Political Economy, and American Constitutionalism, he continues and extends this criticism; but he combines this with an unusual thesis. Not only is modern welfare economics wrong, he says: it violates the principles on which the American Republic was established.
THE POWER PROBLEM: HOW AMERICAN MILITARY DOMINANCE MAKES US LESS SAFE, LESS PROSPEROUS, AND LESS FREE
Christopher A. Preble
Cornell University Press, 2009, xiii + 212 pgs.
RULE OF LAW, MISRULE OF MEN
Elaine Scarry
MIT Press: A Boston Review Book, 2010, xxii + 191 pgs.
Elaine Scarry, a distinguished English professor at Harvard, attracted great acclaim early in her academic career for her study The Body in Pain (1985). It is hardly surprising, then, that the use of torture in the Iraq War has attracted her attention.
JUSTICE: WHAT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO?
Michael J. Sandel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, 307 pages
It is easy to see why Michael Sandel is a popular Harvard professor. He presents major ideas of ethics and political philosophy in a clear way, tied to important contemporary issues. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, based on a famous course that Sandel teaches, offers a discussion of what Sandel regards as the three main competing views of justice.
LIBERTARIANISM TODAY
Jacob H. Huebert
Praeger, 2010, vii + 254 pgs.