The origin and nature of the state has been at the heart of political theory from the time of Plato and Aristotle. While speculations about man’s primal innocence in a state of nature cannot be taken seriously as science, they continue to influence political propaganda. Liberal philosophers like Rawls and Nozick continue to write about man’s natural equality or our...

Richard McKenzie, a member of the economics department of Clemson University, here assesses the probable impact of new government regulation of the economy under what politicians like to call “National Industrial Policy” (NIP). He sets forth the major legislative policy proposals promoted under this rubric, and he examines their probable effect upon international trade, capital taxation, and central planning. Citing...

Unlike the world of democratic politics with its ever-present television cameras and investigative reporters, the world of communism is a realm of mysteries and shadows, understood by few who do not actually hold power. Richard Staar and the 79 regional specialists who have contributed to this encyclopedic volume have performed an invaluable public service by sifting through the available documents...

Tuska’s thesis is that Westerns are not attempts to portray the old West with documentary fidelity, nor do they merely reflect the attitudes of the American public. They are the creation of directors and producers, great and insignificant, men indifferent to historical accuracy and full of their own insights and biases. Furthermore, these insights and biases rarely reflect the attitudes...

As tales of child abuse are screamed out on the nightly news, pressures mount for a national policy. Adolescent children are taken away from parents who appear “too strict,” and state after state have passed laws on child abuse that include vague provisions for “mental health.” Parents are beginning to wonder exactly where they stand. John Whitehead has done a...

“It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however he Battered, when he got me to his house, he would sell me for a slave.” —John Bunyan Kenneth Minogue explains at the outset that he prefers a narrow definition of “ideology”: the word refers not to all action-oriented systems of belief but only to certain types of...

It is tempting to say that Mary Bringle’s Hacks at Lunch was written by a hack—at lunch or otherwise engaged. But so laconic a pronouncement would leave the reviewer open to charges of disingenuousness and flippancy; and, since some such judgment cannot be substantively avoided, it must be elucidated and qualified. The premise of this “novel of the literary life,”...

From August 1941 until November 1943, George Orwell served as the producer and writer of a radio talk show beamed by the BBC out to India. Physically unfit for army duty, he considered the job to be his way of “doing his bit” in the war against Hitler. The image of Orwell as a chief of propaganda is ironic—and was...

Sol M. Linowitz’s autobiography tells once again the classic story of the successful American. Son of a middle-class Jewish wholesale fruit dealer from New Jersey who was impoverished by the Great Depression, Linowitz attended Hamilton College on a partial scholarship, financing the rest of his education by waiting on tables, working in the college library, and selling Christmas cards. He...

“May not a man have several voices . . . as well as two complexions?” —Nathaniel Hawthorne In George Garrett’s stories the conflict often arises between a wild lone Outsider and a generally conscientious but insecure Establishment figure; in Peter Taylor’s stories the conflict is likely to take place between generations, the revolt of the young against their elders. The...

Iconoclasm is the poor man’s intellectualism. Challenge a traditional way of thinking and you can vault yourself instantly into the celebrity spotlight, with lucrative publishing deals, testimonies before congressional committees, and interviews on Good Morning America. Since the 1960’s the iconoclasts have held sway in the study of criminal behavior, ignoring important studies done in the 1940’s and before for...

“As long as virtue was dominant in the republic so long was the happiness of the people secure.” —Robert E. Lee John P. Diggins raises various, often profound, questions about the moral foundations of America as a political society. Diggins is fond of calling attention to what he considers the underlying cultural tensions in American history. He discusses, for example,...

As Israel becomes increasingly important in world affairs, Jews and non-Jews alike increasingly want to understand the origins of the Israeli state and of the Zionist movement. This is volume one of the first scholarly biography of Chaim Weizmann. It provides a thoroughly researched account of how a Russian Jew from the Pale of Settlement came to be, by age...

“The bookful blockhead . . . [w]ith his own tongue still edifies his ears, / And always listening to himself appears.” —Alexander Pope Behind Stephen Berg’s Singular Voices, a new anthology of contemporary native poets writing about their own work, is the voice-theory of poetry, which holds that a poet is valuable not for his perception, his language, his formal...

This is the kind of novel that inspires slick reviewers and writers of publisher’s blurbs to new outrages in inflated but tacky description: “lusty,” “brawling,” “pulsing with ambition,” “passion and greed,” “an epic saga.” The story begins in Mexico in 1927, with flashbacks going back to the turn of the century, and ends in 1982. Set mostly in Mexico with...

Robert Ruark has nothing on Otto Scott for ability to provide simultaneous political commentary and African travelogue. A careful historian and shrewd observer with the ability to set forth his observations with apt parsimony, Scott has written a book eclectic in sweep, including incisive commentary on the state of Western morality, media and culture, and pious chicanery. Scott is a...

“It is better that some should be unhappy, than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.” —Samuel Johnson The best way to corrupt a value is to maximize it. That is one of the fundamental lessons of liberalism in the postwar period. Take rights. Push one person’s rights too far and...

An afternoon’s reading of Bolo’Bolo by “P.M.” leaves the reader wondering what the New York State Council on the Arts is doing giving public money to Columbia University to publish such books. A futuristic Utopian tract, Bolo’Bolo is as inane as it is self-indulgent. Its author, P.M., a slave to every cliche of the untutored stylist, boldly decries (a la...

Controversy and intense media scrutiny marked Dee Jepsen’s 14 months as President Reagan’s Special Assistant for Public Liaison to women’s organizations, until she resigned in October 1983 to work for the unsuccessful reelection campaign of her husband. Senator Roger Jepsen of Iowa. President Reagan’s extemporaneous remark that “if it weren’t for women, men would still be walking around in skin...

In his State of the Union address of January 6, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt looked to the future with confidence: “The new year of 1945 can be the greatest year of achievement in human history,” he declared. “Nineteen forty-five can and must see the substantial beginning of the Organization of World Peace. This Organization must be the fulfillment of the promise...

When historians draw up their lists of ruthless autocrats, Ivan the Terrible is usually near the top. When political scientists assert that totalitarianism is not a new phenomenon, they back up their claim with a reference to Ivan the Terrible, the 16th-century leader of Russia who dominated both church and state. This first Czar of Russia is clearly a benchmark...

“Where so’er I turn my view All is strange, yet nothing new; Endless labour all along, Endless labour to be wrong.” —Samuel Johnson Epicurus had an answer for everything. The universe consisted of nothing except atoms and void; the qualities of matter and of our sensory experience—hardness, color, heaviness, etc.—were determined completely by the size, shape, and motion of the...