Category Archives: History

Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge – Capitalism in America: A History

Posted on October 15, 2019 | Comments Off on Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge – Capitalism in America: A History

Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge – Capitalism in America: A History

Deirdre McCloskey’s review is here. An economic history of the U.S. that is optimistic without being to starry-eyed. Greenspan and Wooldridge say wise things about two of my main policy interests. Early on, they have an excellent 30,000-foot level discussion of regulation. They don’t directly cite my colleague Wayne Crews or his Ten Thousand Commandments, but some of his numbers and many of his arguments appear prominently.

Later in the book, they give a defense of modern prosperity, complementing thinkers such as Julian Simon, Matt Ridley, Hans Rosling, and Deirdre McCloskey. They also draw on Cox and Alm’s ever-useful measure of how many hours an average person must work in order to afford a loaf of bread, a tv, a car, and other things. For the better part of two centuries, Americans have been getting more and better goods in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.

In between these two highlights is a fairly comprehensive business history of America, from roughly the founding up until now. Their discussion of the rise of the Carnegie, Rockefellers Vanderbilts, and Morgans of the world would have improved from a deeper discussion of competition theory that includes the Brandeisian view, the Borkian view, as well as the public choice critique of both (see Wayne Crews’ and my recent paper for that). Given Greenspan’s name recognition and Woodridge’s skilled writing and distillations, this is a book that will likely sell far better than the average of its genre, and hopefully will be more read as well. Not perfect, but good—much like the economy it studies.

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Posted in Books, Economics, History, Uncategorized

Richard L. Currier – Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink

Posted on October 4, 2019 | Comments Off on Richard L. Currier – Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink

Richard L. Currier – Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink

I hastily bought this book on sale thinking it was a yet another Schumpeter-inspired history of technology by an economist. I was pleasantly surprised to find it is written from an anthropologist’s perspective, and most of the book has little to do with economics or markets. Moreover, it is excellently done.

Currier has packed Unbound with evolutionary, biological, social, and behavioral insights into how technology has influenced the human condition, and vice versa. Causality’s arrow points in both directions, with massive implications for everything from our anatomy to gender roles, sexual behavior, and even our species’ geographic range. Bipedalism freed up our hands to use weapons and tools. The extra food provided calories for larger brains to use and improve these tools. Larger brains meant longer gestations and tougher childbirths, which effectively made hunting a men-only activity; this is the origin of gender roles that are unique to our species, though obviously this dynamic does not apply as it once did. To tease out these insights, Currier ranges all the way back to our Australopithecine and Homo habilis ancestors, as well as other primates such as chimpanzees and bonobos.

Among the other things the reader learns is that our species’ relative hairlessness was a direct result of our taming fire. This had obvious safety benefits, and I was probably not the only reader to have a Gary Larson-inspired chuckle at how this may have affected some of our more hirsute ancestors as natural selection did its work.

Chapters on tools, fire, clothing, and language give way to agriculture, transportation and eventually industrial production, around which point the book changes tone. By the 19th century or so the book begins to read less like an anthropology story and more like a history of business and technology, along the lines of Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators. The eighth and final technology is the emerging digital age, which is still maturing as we speak. Even at this early stage, Currier is correct about how the Internet, digitalization, and rapid globalization are having a transformative impact on par with the other great technologies.

There is another abrupt change in the final chapter, which is mostly paint-by-numbers hysterics over mass extinction and environmental apocalypse. This is alluded to in the book’s subtitle, though mostly absent until this point. Here, Currier shows that he has not often ventured outside his disciplinary home of anthropology. He would have benefited from an understanding of more diverse thinkers such as Julian Simon, Hans Rosling, Johan Norberg, Deirdre McCloskey, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, Joel Mokyr, Bjorn Lomborg, and other scholars from a range of disciplines from statistics to economic history to psychology, who are more adept in the study of progress.

Unlike the rest of an otherwise carefully written book, this final chapter reads like it was written in a single caffeinated cram session. Cautious words like “could” and “might” gradually morph into more certain proclamations such as “will” and “have” as the chapter proceeds. The very end also oddly mentions the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs, but Currier correctly identifies tariffs as harmful policies, and his emotions carry him in favor of international openness and inclusion. At the very end, Currier suddenly goes through another mood swing and ends on an optimistic note about. Unlike just a few pages before, Currier now argues that dynamism and progress might forestall the coming environmental apocalypse after all. Before he can change his mind again, the book ends. In all, that odd journey reminded me of the occasional all-nighter I pulled back in undergrad trying to finish term papers on time.

Despite the weird rollercoaster ending, Unbound was one of my better reads of the year. It is almost like a wider-ranging sequel to Richard Wrangham’s excellent Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, which Currier cites liberally in his early chapter about fire. It also pairs well with Arthur Diamond’s Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism, though that book’s Pollyanna-ish tone is a bit much even for this optimist.

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Posted in Books, History, Innovation, Technology, Uncategorized

Charles J. Halperin – Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History

Posted on October 3, 2019 | Comments Off on Charles J. Halperin – Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History

Charles J. Halperin – Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History

Halperin focuses more on the Russian side than on the Golden Horde. These Mongol descendants of Genghis and Batu Khan left behind comparatively few written sources, but Halperin still gives them plenty of attention.

The big picture periodization of this era of Russian and Central Asian history goes roughly like this: Russia had its first post-classical flowering in the Kievan Rus period, which lasted from roughly the 9th to 13th centuries. This came to an end with the 13th century Mongol invasions. After Genghis Khan, Mongol conquerors split into a number of different groups. The one that ruled over most of Russia from about 1240-1480 was called the Golden Horde. Other Mongol dynasties reigned in India (Mughal; note the resemblance to “Mongol”), Yuan China, which displaced the comparatively liberal Song dynasty; and much of the Middle East.

The Golden Horde ruled over Russia more than two centuries, surviving even the late-1300s wrath of Tamerlane attacking them from the south. They lasted until about 1480, when the tsarist government began to assert itself in earnest under Ivan III (his grandson was Ivan IV, better known as Ivan the Terrible). This 1240-1480 period is Halperin’s primary focus. There was not a single clean-line event when the Tatars ceded power to the tsars, which is why the periodization is not precise. The handover was a gradual process, and happened to different degrees and at different times in different places. Both cultures may well have been unaware of their trajectories at the time, which is a common theme in history.

Halperin shows a keen eye for how to interpret sources. One of the key concepts of written Russian sources of this period is the ideology of silence. Basically, there was a taboo among Russians against acknowledging that Mongols had ever conquered them. They used linguistic workarounds, which Halperin dissects, omitted important events only revealed by other sources, and emphasize smaller events and puff up minor victories.

One price of this was that they also had to downplay the big victories that eventually led to Russians shedding the Tatar yoke, which ordinarily would become the stuff of legend. This was apparently a price chroniclers were apparently willing to pay.

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Posted in Books, History

Robert Harris – Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome

Posted on October 2, 2019 | Comments Off on Robert Harris – Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome

Robert Harris – Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome

The second volume of Harris’ trilogy of historical novels about Cicero. I read the first book, Imperium, many years ago at my former colleague Gene Healy’s recommendation, and greatly enjoyed it. Harris writes from the point of view of Tiro, a real-life figure who was Cicero’s slave. Tiro was Cicero’s secretary and despite his slave status, a trusted friend. One of his jobs was taking down Cicero’s many speeches and dictations, and he invented a form of shorthand still in use today so he could keep up with his master. Tiro invented the ampersand (“&”), the abbreviations “etc.” for et cetera and “e.g.” for exemplis grata (“for example” in English), and other common shortcuts. Harris’ choice of narrator is a good one.

Conspirata consists of two parts. The first covers the year of Cicero’s consulship, 63 B.C., and the Catiline conspiracy, which was a narrowly-foiled assassination plot by the Senator Catiline against Cicero. The second part covers the next several years, which involved the rise of Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus, the first Triumvirate. Roman politics divided into populist and aristocratic factions, called populares and optimates. Cicero was philosophically closer to the optimates, but as a self-made homo novo (“new man”) without a lengthy noble heritage, he was not fully accepted into their orbit. The book ends on a low note, with Cicero’s exile from Rome, thus setting things up for the third volume of the trilogy.

As with the previous book, the events are dramatized and not to be taken as literal history. But Harris has clearly done his research, and the personalities, settings, and events are authentic, and as far as I can tell he gets most things correct. The value in this book is two-fold—seeing events through Tiro’s eyes, who was both a participant and an observer, is quite a bit different perspective than the usual narrative history. Harris is also a fine novelist, and the book is intrinsically enjoyable, and gives a vivid picture of the times.

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Posted in Books, History, Literature, Uncategorized

Tim Alberta – American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump

Posted on October 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Tim Alberta – American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump

Tim Alberta – American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump

Note: I wrote this review about a month ago, before Congress began an impeachment investigation against President Trump. I have left it unedited.

Alberta is a political correspondent for Politico. I read his book with Stephen Davies’ political realignment thesis in mind. According to Davies, people tend to align around two opposite poles in politics–but those poles tend to move around every few generations. For a lengthy period starting around the end of World War II, those two poles were capitalism and socialism. Now, with the Soviet Union almost 30 years gone, those poles have lost their relevance. Worldwide, political parties are realigning around new poles. This time around, it’s a nationalism-vs.-globalism axis.

This is apparent in the UK’s Brexit debate, and the election of populist leaders in Brazil, Italy, Mexico, and elsewhere. The process usually takes a couple of election cycles, and happens faster in some countries than in others. As Alberta’s book unintentionally shows, realignment is happening right now in America. It is also fairly far along, but not yet complete.

The GOP’s civil war is a referendum about President Trump on the surface. But the deeper philosophical split is one of nationalism against a more cosmopolitan worldview. The same fight is happening in the Democratic party, though without its own Trump-like figure to rally around or against, the struggle on the left side of the aisle is quieter. Alberta focuses almost exclusively on the GOP; a similar treatment of the Democratic Party’s realignment process would be a welcome addition to the literature.

The main fault with this book is that it is far longer than it needs to be. This is especially true of its 2016 campaign coverage, which feels as endless as the original campaign did. 2016 takes up about a third of a book that covers an entire decade. A fair amount of the campaign season slog in the book is essentially an ESPN-style highlight show of debate highlights, gaffes, and flash-in-the-pan candidates and personalities who were relevant for a few news cycles, but not particularly important for Alberta’s larger story arc.

Alberta convincingly shows, though again in more detail than necessary, that once Republicans choose a leader, they’ll follow him no matter what. This was apparent during George W. Bush’s presidency, when Republicans went along with Bush’s massive spending and entitlement increases and needless wars, and even the Keynesian bailout on which he collaborated with President Obama, who is otherwise mostly a two-minutes hate figure in the GOP.

Republicans’ pre-existing meekness has greatly amplified under Trump, almost to the point of becoming the party’s defining characteristic. He is strongly disliked inside his own party, but nobody in a position to is willing to put up meaningful opposition, whether to Trump’s spending and deficits, or his trade and immigration policies. They are just as meek about Trump’s intentionally divisive rhetoric, cozying up to dictators, and at times, outright racism.

Paul Ryan’s tragic career arc is the most prominent example, and Alberta tells it masterfully. Ryan’s choice of party over policy backfired, and ultimately led him to retire–though he was also put in an impossible situation. He became House Speaker with his party in mid-realignment. He also had a President foisted on him who is not temperamentally fit for the job, and has no philosophical commitment for or against Ryan’s policies, making him neither friend nor foe, despite their shared party membership.

Ryan’s story is is just one of many sad commentaries on party politics. Alberta shares savage assessments about Trump from some of Trump’s closest allies—many without the cover of anonymity. It is almost worse that Republicans are going along with Trump’s policies with their eyes open. They know better, and yet they continue to support Trump’s policies, values, and rhetoric. They have chosen to be this way.

Alberta’s story of weak Republican knees extends to the human weakness for a good us-vs.them narrative. People are eager to affirm their identity as part of a group, and are quick to vilify people outside it. This is why hard partisans are so eager to believe odd conspiracy theories, such as Barack Obama being born in Kenya, or Hillary Clinton running a prostitution ring from a pizza parlor—stories which Alberta tells in comic, yet tragic fashion. It also explains why President Trump’s base and party stick by him despite almost widespread misgivings about his character and his policies.

Adding Davies’ political realignment thesis on top of Alberta’s storytelling adds another level. The GOP’s reluctance to pursue limited government policies under Bush has become an active hostility to its Reagan-Goldwater tradition. People with an economist’s views on trade, immigration, and spending restraint used to be merely ignored. Now, they are actively sought as the enemy, to the point of Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro bizarrely comparing the Wall Street Journal to the communist China Daily. The GOP is still running on an us-vs.-them narrative, but the definition of “them” has changed. “Them” used to be socialists or people who prefer big government. Now “them” is seen in national, cultural, or racial terms.

The question is what will happen post-Trump. Both parties have strong populist elements. But in a two-party system there is likely only room for one strong populist party. Will that party be the Republicans or the Democrats? It’s too early to tell. The GOP base has eagerly embraced national populism, but most of the party establishment is playing along reluctantly. That support is also largely personality-based, and that personality will be gone from politics in either 2021 or 2025. The Democratic party is also divided, though the base-establishment split isn’t nearly as clean. They also lack a personality-cult figure to rally around. Much as I dislike horserace politics, how this one plays out over the next few cycles will be interesting to watch. About all we know for at this point is that there are very few good guys in this story, and they will all likely lose.

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Posted in Books, Elections, History, Political Animals, Uncategorized

Andrew J. Newman – Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire

Posted on September 27, 2019 | Comments Off on Andrew J. Newman – Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire

Andrew J. Newman – Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire

The Safavid dynasty was one of the most liberal periods in Iranian history. Iran, of course, was not a nation-state in today’s sense of the term until the 20th century. Safavid territory also included Baghdad and ranged up north into Afghanistan, several of the steppe countries and parts of Georgia, including Tiflis (now Tblisi), and ranged east almost as far east as Bukhara. It lasted from about 1510 to 1722, with a few dying embers lasting until 1736, a little bit like post-Louis XVI Bourbons.

For context, the Safavid dynasty ranged roughly from just before Europe’s Reformation and post-Columbian exploration age through the Scientific Revolution and the early Enlightenment. It began roughly a century after Tamerlane conquered most western and northern Asia. China’s Ming dynasty reached its peak and was overthrown during the Safavid era. The most famous Safavid monarch was Abbas I (reigned 1588-1629, roughly contemporaneous with Shakespeare, the second half of Elizabeth I’s reign, and her successor James I). But the generations before and after Abbas I were also comparatively liberal. One of the few opinions Newman ventures is that the Safavids were not a one-hit wonder with Abbas I as the dynasty’s only notable head.

The regime’s official religion was Twelver Shi’ism, which was an important development in Islamic history. But by the standards of their time, the Safavids were highly tolerant of both other kinds of Islam and non-Islamic religions. They compared favorably to both the Europeans of their time and the Iranian government in ours.

Art, architecture, poetry, and literature thrived, both in court and among regular people. Despite ongoing tensions with the Ottomans to the East and limited direct ties to Europe, an openness to trade also made Safavid territories prosperous enough where high art and exotic goods were affordable even to the middle class; even in Europe such things as single-page prints were still mostly the province of the wealthy. At the same time, the Safavid Dynasty was founded on military power, survived by the sword, and ultimately died by it. Its liberalism was in comparative, not economic terms. It is a complex, multifacted period, and was interconnected with what was going on in Europe, Turkey, Russia, India, and China.

Newman’s book is drily written, focusing heavily on kings and battles, and names and dates. If the reader enters with some knowledge of world history from 1500-1700, and a willingness to Google new names, places, and terms, they can tease more insights out of Newman’s narrow and literal focus. His grayscale portrait could have used some color. Unfortunately, English-language histories of the period are hard to come by, so Newman it is. Readers are mostly on their own for discerning the Safavid dynasty’s larger significance and context, and are rarely given interpretations to agree or disagree with. This was still a profitable read, but requires a more active approach on the reader’s part than most books.

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Posted in Books, History, International, Uncategorized

Lawrence Freedman – Strategy: A History

Posted on September 26, 2019 | Comments Off on Lawrence Freedman – Strategy: A History

Lawrence Freedman – Strategy: A History

There are a few subjects I’ve always found uninteresting, despite my best efforts. Most of them involve conflict, rather than cooperation; this may be why I am so drawn to economics, which is the study of human cooperation. Uninteresting (to me) conflicts include theological disputes, most military history, and strategy of the zero-sum variety.

This book didn’t change my mind about military history, but the rest of it is surprisingly engaging. It is also very long—I recommend the audio version. Organized mostly chronologically, the book starts with ancient Greek, Roman, and biblical figures, quickly dispenses with the cliched Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, and gives John Milton’s Paradise Lost a surprising turn.

The part titled “Strategy from Below” is mostly about different theories of socialist revolution, which has a wealth of different approaches and strategic philosophies that apply well outside that ideology. One complication is that socialism is a top-down strategy to social organization; “Strategy from Above” would have been a more accurate title. He also could have done more to highlight the differences between Marx’s belief that revolution could only happen in an already-industrialized country; Lenin’s focus on small professional cadres; Mao’s blend of pastoralism and centralized decentralization; and various decentralized anarchist movements. But I still learned a lot from Freedman’s treatment.

Freedman’s discussion of the civil rights movement is excellent, and far more rewarding than the usual black-and-white contrast between Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violence versus more radical strategies. As is often the case, there is much more to the story, with many in-between strategies working towards the common goals of equal rights and ending segregation.

The mostly white and middle-class 1960s campus radicals often come off as privileged twits by comparison. Counterculture has great value in moving social norms over in favor of individualism and dynamism, against war. The movement also produced some excellent art, literature, and music. But it fell short in more serious areas such as political philosophy and strategy, and badly failed in staying clear of self-evidently dumb new age philosophy.

The next part, “Strategy from Above,” focuses mainly on business and management, which is more a blend of blending top-down management strategies in firms that are constantly reacting to new developments in bottom-up emergent orders. The section title is poorly chosen, but the content is good.

As the baby boomer generation entered middle age and middle management, some of its members became part of a new management guru movement. It came complete with ghostwritten self-help books, outrageous speaker fees, and power suits with built-in shoulder pads. Freedman calls them these management gurus the snake oil salesmen they are, and shares some amusing behind-the-scenes stories from this movement’s heyday.

But life did not begin with the baby boomers. Freedman begins this movement’s roots to about a century before, while offering an unfortunately conventional and easily disproven account of Standard Oil and the early antitrust movement. At the same time, he is critical of Frederick Taylor and his top-down Taylorite management philosophy, which was espoused by early-20th century thinkers from Rockefeller’s nemesis Ida Tarbell to President Woodrow Wilson.

Freedman doesn’t go into detail about this, but Taylorist thinking grew out of the German Historicist school. Its regimented, top-down ethos inspired much fascist and corporatist public policy, most openly by Mussolini. More bottom-up inclined thinkers such as Mises and Hayek both grew up in Austria when German Historicism was at its peak, and developed their emergent-order liberalism in part as a direct reaction against the Historical School.

Later sections introduce underappreciated figures such as Henry Simon, William Riker (the political scientist, not the Star Trek: The Next Generation character), and Mancur Olson. Freedman also discusses the role of game theory in corporate, military, and government strategies in the post-war era.

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Posted in Books, Competition, History

Jennifer Wright – Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

Posted on September 24, 2019 | Comments Off on Jennifer Wright – Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

Jennifer Wright – Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

Wright has an irreverent, slightly offbeat sense of humor that is perfect for her topic, reminding me a bit of a more restrained Mary Roach. Wright takes a mostly chronological tour of disease, starting with the Antonine plague in ancient Rome, up through the bubonic plague, and on to the present day. In the 19th century, tuberculosis was oddly fashionable, in much the same way that the sunken, desiccated features associated with heroin chic are stylish today among fashion models. It was a glamorous disease, except that it very much wasn’t. Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine get a chapter, and Wright discusses the depth of the anti-Semitism he faced.

The chapter on encephalitis lethargica was poignant. The disease, which briefly flared up in the 1910s and 1920s, would essentially turn its victims into bed-bound, non-responsive zombies for years, and in some cases decades. The neurologist Oliver Sacks was able to revive some of his patients, who had no memories from after falling ill. One woman who fell ill during the 1920s flapper craze at age 21 woke up in 1960s an old woman, still exhibiting 1920s-era speech patterns and with no life experiences beyond early adulthood. Worse, Sacks’ treatments only worked for a few years. Patients would eventually revert to their former state, their revival a temporary one. Was it worth it? Different patients may have had different answers to that question.

Wright’s treatment of syphilis and other STDs, on the other hand, is often hilarious. The most recent major plague, HIV/AIDS, is less humorous, but is on track to have a happier ending, though not without millions of lives being destroyed first, and with social conservatives causing their usual intended harm.

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Posted in Books, History, Science, Uncategorized

Jacob Burckhardt – The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Posted on September 20, 2019 | Comments Off on Jacob Burckhardt – The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Jacob Burckhardt – The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Burckhardt, one of the 19th century’s greatest historians, coined the term “Renaissance.” He has an eye for larger themes, from the period’s rediscovery of Greek and Roman classics to the growing importance of international trade and cultural and intellectual exchange. He also gives plenty of attention to the Renaissance’s emphasis on the individual and free will, and its rejection of the notion of people being links in a greater Chain of Being, in which they are to play an assigned role in the social category into which they were born.

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Posted in Books, History

Bernard Bailyn – The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Posted on September 19, 2019 | Comments Off on Bernard Bailyn – The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Bernard Bailyn – The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

This 1967 book has long been a Cato Institute favorite, and had been on my to-read list for years. It was particularly influential on Gene Healy’s Cult of the Presidency, which makes a compelling case for reining in an executive branch that has grown proportionally too powerful compared to the legislative and judicial branches.

Bailyn is a very detailed writer; his more recent The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction is so filled with minutiae in its chapter-by-chapter crawl of the different regions of North America’s east coast takes almost as long as the actual journey. Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is much livelier in comparison. It opens with a close look at the origins of pamphlets as a medium, in Bailyn’s usual microscopic detail, discussing everything from page size to word counts to stylistic conventions—yet it’s genuinely interesting, and difficult to put down.

Other themes get similar treatment, but Bailyn always keeps in mind the bigger picture; there is method to his madness. Along the way I was surprised to learn of John Adams’ skepticism of Montesquieu, who inspired many revolutionary ideas. Adams, ever practical, thought Montesquieu’s thought too theoretical and idealized. Bailyn also offers insights into the debates over when rebellion was a legitimate course of action (Locke was not the only inspiration); the rejection of rigid European-style social hierarchy and titled nobility; slavery; freedom of religion; and more.

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Posted in Books, History, Philosophy, Political Animals, Uncategorized