Anthony Clifford

The current social environment will probably see to it for a while yet that most of these 'privilleged white males' -- mostly -- from the latter half of the nineteenth century, continue to be mostly forgotten ; this despite MacFarlane's worthy effort here to revive their memories. The first three essays are the best, and their subjects most interesting. MacFarlane has done a lot of varied research and has communicated it well. Quite possibly he himself may have been somewhat underestimated in his day.

The first two essays in this book, on Descartes and Spinoza, are brilliantly written pieces. The third one, on Locke, could have been better. Gottlieb takes quite a cheap shot, of a postmodern sort, at Locke over property, "and all that". I know how cheap a shot he's taken, because I've fired it myself in the past, and come to regret it. Famously Locke states in Two Treatises, that it is the best use of property, in landed form, that ultimately is the rightful determinant of who should have it. From this proposition, Gottlieb proceeds directly to dispossession of American Indian populations and colonial supplanting of them. Accordingly, Locke's truth here, is made immediately to seem dubious. Perhaps it is, but only if that's all you find to say about it. Gottlieb sees no reason to say more on the subject. This is almost inexcusable. He could have pointed out that Locke was a product of his time here, and that the idea of legitimate political representation being attached to property ownership or interest, had already evolved from its Magna Carta beginnings, and that in time to come, during the nineteenth century, would further progress through developments in liberal democracy and expanded democratic franchise and ultimately universal suffrage. Furthermore, ideas about social democracy, also from the nineteenth century onwards, moved the concept of representative legitimacy even further beyond traditional classical liberal ties to landed interest. All of this matters hugely, because unlike all the antiquated and largely redundant philosophical history recounted in this book, the development of political liberalism and its British origins, is the only possible philosophy still relevant to how we should want to continue to live today. Classical liberalism has been all but elided to death within humanities departments across the western world. It urgently needs looking at again in much greater depth, before it's too late.

Doyle is one of a handful of well educated anti woke warriors getting around the English-speaking world at present, trying to make a positive difference and largely succeeding thank goodness. This book is very well written and methodically compiled. Doyle however writes of something he calls 'social liberalism'. I'm not sure that there is any such movement in existence. Doyle seems to posit 'social liberalism' out of wishful thinking. You can either be a Social Democrat, or you can be a Liberal Democrat, but you really can't be both. The reason you can't be both is because of economics and the material nature of our political existence, separate from culture. Classical liberalism was for most of its developmental history bound up wholly in the field of political economy and within this subject always lay the rub of collective action to some degree or other being at odds with individual rights ; it's what makes the study of the nineteenth and twentieth century evolution of liberalism so incredibly complex and difficult. Social Democracy and Liberal Democracy are two sides of a very valuable coin we should prize, and hang onto, rather than look to bashing it on an anvil back into some form of base metal called social liberalism. But all of this will be for another day. The moderate right and the moderate left, the latter being from where Doyle seems to come, must first unite to defeat the Critical Social Justice movement before we can all go back to sane, sensible and required debate about our shared and individual material conditions.

Being of the left, and a fairly secular Jew, Michael Gawenda may or may not appreciate Edmund Burke's reduced and condensed notion of social contract ; that the furtherance of civilized life and community rests on a compact between the dead, the living and the yet to be born. Not so long after Burke wrote ( or perhaps spoke ) this, Thomas Jefferson dismissed it summarily by countering that government is for the living, not the dead. Modern day conservatives get the essence of this exchange immediately ; modern day progressives not so much. To Michael Gawenda's one-time friend, Louise Adler, progressive secular Jews should not give in to any sort of wretched sentimentality about their heritage, certainly where Israel and Zionism is concerned. If they do, then at best they're letting the dead ( and perhaps the murdered also ? ) get in the way of Palestinians leading a better life to which Jews and westerners of this mindset have hitherto deprived them. It's wrong on the part of Adler and the modern day left, and it comforts and advances incredibly and horribly distorted causes, as we saw last October. But it also leaves Jewish people in a constantly apologetic and defensive position that is imposed on them grossly unfairly and which sticks no matter what they happen to think or believe about Israel and Zionism. But of course it's worse than this, because Adler and many others subscribe to the idea of powerful Jews manipulating information in the public sphere to shape the pro Israel cause. This is bs, as Gawenda skillfully shows. The extent to which Gawenda and Adler must have become estranged, is contrasted in the background of this book throughout, but it isn't necessarily the predominant theme. If Adler reads it, she'll see she was wrong, but lefties don't like admitting they're ever wrong, unfortunately. This book was published prior to the October seventh atrocities. But if a new edition is put out, all that Gawenda probably need add by way of preface would be, 'what did I tell you'. Gawenda's prose is brilliant. His account of what being a Jew means to him, is heartfelt and full of interest. It would be good if he was twenty years younger and could go back and be editor of The Age newspaper again. At the very least the readership of the paper would be greater as a result. He's a fine writer. A few minor criticisms however ; Gawenda a few times refers to Donald Trump as a populist authoritarian. ( In the context of David Mamet's drift to the political right ) Trump may well be a populist but - though time may tell further - anyone who believes that the power of the state should be reduced, not increased, is no authoritarian. And this : it is implied at the end of the book, in passing, that identity politics is not of the left. It certainly ain't of what might loosely be called the liberal right, though ; it is in fact the outcome of New Left nonsense and intellectual fashions generated in the early to mid twentieth century.

At one point in this book, Baddiel generalises a type of person with whom he typically deals, on line, who tend to "downgrade the category of antisemitism to that of religious intolerance". This, as Baddiel goes on, "gives them more of a free hand with Jews, as religious intolerance is 'not as bad' as racism." Immediately after this, Baddiel almost inexplicably writes this in parenthesis : "( In fact, religious intolerance could almost be seen as a good thing in this view, religion being a belief system with power and money attached, worthy of satire and mockery. )" So, if you're into Friday prayers and all that jazz, and especially if you're a practicing Catholic, a Congregational or Evangelical Christian, or even a vanilla C of E Sunday Church goer, then you're fair game for a bit of fun-poking. And if perchance you're Jewish and not out and about at all that much of a Saturday, well it could be that some -- not all mind, only some -- bets might be off here, or there ; for these are the impossible double standard knots that progressives like to tie everyone, including themselves, up in. I like David Baddiel. I don't happen to know what he has said or written publicly post October seventh. I imagine his dismay with the left has intensified. Why on earth therefore, if this should prove to be the case, doesn't he simply abandon the left? Why doesn't he do what a lot of comedians should do, and speak to his audience as intelligent individuals of a classical liberal disposition, rather than as the like-minded "fight-y" collectivist bunch he instead would have them be?

As you read this, you're constantly trying to form an image of the man, his mannerisms and, as well, hear his voice, speech patterns and intonations. But it's hard to get any reliable sense of the man at all. I looked up his Tussaud's wax version and found quite an austere-seeming one. The cartoon of Disraeli featured on this book cover, on the other hand shows the softer featured, dandyish, more humane-seeming facsimile of him. He was a proud Jew who never seems to have been bothered overly by antisemitism. But, so the authors tell us, he was rather hollow and opportunistic by nature. In fact they go so far as to tell us that Dizzy stood for virtually bugger all in any meaningful sense. He wasn't a 'one nation' conservative, and he enlarged the franchise only because the dictates of the political game demanded he do so. After having read this, I've genuinely no real idea who Disraeli was. But this isn't any fault of the authors ; this was the effect they were aiming for. Odd altogether really ; it's been a bit like trying, in real time, to figure Boris Johnson out.

John Adams knew quite early, perhaps as early as Burke did, that the French Revolution couldn't possibly bring any good to anyone because in France in the early 1790s, only two percent of the population was literate. Only disaster could ensue from investing power in the hands of masses who couldn't read or write. I've always wondered why Jews are talented disproportionately in all populations in which they feature. Roth goes a long way to explaining it throughout this work, as he can do, for instance, so succinctly in just two sentences ; "Jews are of an intellectual cast. They are a people that has had no illiterates for nearly two thousand years now". I doubt it is possible to underestimate how significant this point is. Talent and cleverness bring inevitable resentment. It's a terrible terrible shame, and god help us all if we in the west go on pandering to the Arab world and encouraging their unspeakable indulgence in it.

What would an eighteen-year old undergraduate student about to undertake a unit in nineteenth century British political history expect to learn about in 2023 or 2024? Well, their secondary education might have prepared them for all the usual righteous Marxian deconstruction of structural colonialism they're about to enter into. It wouldn't matter either as to which institution they attended, anywhere in the western world. This same 'clap-trap morality' today prevails. And if you want to discover the antecedence of 'clap-trap morality', ( viewed in retrospect however you might like to ) then this would be but one of many good reasons to read Peter Ackroyd's excellent history. Ackroyd writes with wit. The only 'point' he endeavours to get across is that, simply, things improve over time ; and that it is a witless undertaking to judge and condemn historic actors retrospectively. Young students should read this. They might even allow themselves to enjoy it what's more.

What a pleasure to read this book is. Norman's extended essay, comprising the second half of it, is almost worthy of Burke himself. And to think Norman, until perhaps recently ( ? ) had been tasked as the UK's commissar of 'decarbonisation'. God, that's what having a brilliantly clear mind earns you in modern conservative politics these days. I'm glad I'm just a humble odd-bod Spencerian liberal instead.

One contention in this book is that in the west at present, we have a glut of university humanities and social science graduates who form elites of varying useless sorts. Yes. This book stems from precisely this excess. In the introduction we're told that America was great under the New Deal, because it was an attempt to transform American society along "Nordic" lines. Now, not enough information is given, in fact none is offered in the introduction, as to what this means exactly, at least according to Turchin. But I think we can guess : Big government ; big tax take ; big public sector. This works just swell for Norway, sure. Norway gets a gazillion dollars ( US that is of course ) each year from North sea oil and gas reserves. Norway has in turn a small population. Norway would need to be really really bad at running itself, either as a socialist utopia, or as any other kind of tin pot joint not to be doing an awful lot accidentally right courtesy of all that fossil fuel lucre. And it's fairly likely that much of Norway's oil and gas revenue spills over its borders into Sweden. To think it doesn't is like suggesting that in the Australian federation, the state of Victoria could remain prosperous without the mining revenues other states in the federation generate and of which benefits are generally shared. ( Victoria most definitely couldn't ; and incidentally won't in spite of such future benefit. ) Sweden luckily also has its own economic base industries. No one could deny, or would bother to, that Nordic countries have something to recommend them, however boring they may be otherwise. But fancy taking as a prospective model for a polity of 340 million people, a more homogeneous, if formally separated, tiny polity of only about 25 million -- ridiculous. And then there's the economic data. New Deal policies entrenched the depression in the United States throughout the 1930s. In Australia, which did not, under the federal Lyons Government, go in for massive social and infrastructure spending programs as in America, the recovery occurred much earlier. Turchin also says in the introduction, that in essence everything in America went to pot in 1980, the year Reagan was elected. It's funny that, to Turchin, the years 1976-1980, the Carter years, and the preceding Ford ones which were worse, don't seem to have been noteworthily bad at all. Perhaps he can't remember what sort of place New York City was in those years. ( Much less pleasant than was made out in many a Woody Allen movie, mate ). All of this matters because what Turchin and other lefties like him prescribe, has already been tried throughout the west and failed by about the time he nominates, 1980. By then the welfare state had chugged along for forty years and had produced decay and malaise ; other people's money had run out in ways very similar to what Hayek had predicted in the early forties. Turchin's understanding of the history of wage decline over the last forty years is fictional. He substitutes power relations whenever, which is often, that the going gets tough in trying to avoid the concept altogether of productivity -- and of course the relative and internationally comparative decline of it throughout the period. Reputable Academies need to steer students firmly away from stuff like this. It simply doesn't stack up ; It's crypto-socialism in which the outlandish claim is made that the scientific basis for the prediction of history has been found. Really.