The Individualists book review

I’ve got a few pleasingly geeky items to share today. The first is my review in The Hub of and John Tomasi’s book The Individualists, an intellectual history of the libertarian movement. I suggest that the book is worth reading not only if you’re interested in libertarianism (though that’s why I read it!) but because it uses a framework useful for thinking about how the values, commitments, and political context of the people who represent a political ideology shape what that ideology looks like. This is even true in a political movement that sees itself as following rationally from solid principles in the way that libertarianism does, so it’s surely true of everyone else.

“Come for the explanation of why a Cold War political lens is inappropriate for understanding libertarianism today, stay for another way of thinking about our political world.” Read the review here.

I have a pair of pieces with my lovely and talented pal and colleague Christy Lynn Horpedahl at Adam Smith Works, in which we speculate (based on a social media question) about what Adam Smith might have thought about work as a vocation.

In part 1, we talk about vocation as a “calling” and how Smith thought that human potential and temperament might have fed into his answer to this question.

In part 2, we consider how Smith’s thoughts about the interests of workers, and sympathy and reason, and what we know about the life of Adam Smith might reveal how he’d think of work as a vocation.

These were a lot of fun, and proof that good things can occasionally still come from the website formerly known as Twitter. (But I’m not going back.)

What am I reading these days?

I am still reading, and remain enthusiastic about, Kevin J. Elliott’s Democracy for Busy People. I’ll be reviewing it, so it’s a close rather than a quick read.

I’ve read and re-read (well, listened and re-listened, referencing the physical text) Seyward Darby’s Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, an engaging read that provides a lot to think about if you’re concerned about more than just the lost-young-men narrative about the far-right.

I’ve started Kathleen Bewel’s Bringing the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. I was unaware of how similar the influences Bewel sees on the white power movement are to the observations of Coyne and Hall in Tyranny Comes Home. It’s fun when worlds collide, and the collision has updated my thinking about the domestic social effects of war.

(Those last two books are informing more work in the vein of my Liberal Currents piece, Deradicalizing the Centre—in case you missed it.)

And finally, food for thought: This three-and-a-half-year-old Zach Beauchamp piece argues for the liberal adoption of identity politics. He argues in a recent piece that liberals are absorbing the best of the radical critiques that came from identity politics without adopting its illiberal conclusions.