PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)In bald summary, Fukuyama’s bravura prosecution sounds harsher than it reads. He is stringent but never parodic or snide. His call to order ends with a short, positive to-do list for shoring up the liberal centre: effective, \'impersonal\' government; devolution or subsidiarity; antitrust, especially for big media; less quarter for group demands; a \'liberal\' patriotism against the wrong sort of nationalists. Humane as ever, he adds two practical virtues: intellectual moderation and a feel for the achievable ... It is hard to think of a better case for liberal centrism with a conservative tinge than Liberalism and Its Discontents. Or, to be exact, a better case against liberal centrism’s more vocal critics.
Sohrab Ahmari
MixedNew York TimesAhmari urges people to honor their parents, not to expect always to think for themselves and to grasp that religious and sexual liberty mask \'deeper unfreedom.\' A final chapter recalls advice from Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who tutored Nero, not to worry unduly about death ... Keen as he is to fight, there is much that Ahmari’s foes, whether liberal progressives or liberal conservatives, can warm to. He sees that ideas matter in politics and regrets intellectual over-specialization ... The book’s virtues, however, struggle throughout with a damaging vice: the abuse of tradition. In this, Ahmari is at least evenhanded. He caricatures not just liberalism but his own faith by attributing to it more unity, simplicity and authority than historically it has ever possessed.
Ernst Jünger, Trans. by Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen
PositiveFinancial TimesNow translated into English for the first time, his second world war diaries show readers a middle-aged Captain Jünger as he revealed a private self, no doubt with an eye to eventual publication: camera-like, complicit, revelling in civilized pursuits by day; weary, frightened and guilty-feeling at night. Aphorisms, philosophical half-thoughts and religious musings jostle with odd, though seldom funny, dreams. Small pleasures flank sudden horrors. Jolting images appear and vanish as if on the surface of a lake. None of it adds up. No line is drawn or balance struck. Jünger, the political conservative who scorned modernity’s disorder, wrote a very modern, unconservative prose ... A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer.
Erica Benner
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...[an] erudite and engaging life of Machiavelli ... Be Like the Fox is not detached, archival history but a remarkable work of imaginative engagement backed by scholarly learning. Benner brings Machiavelli alive by weaving his words and those of his contemporaries into the narrative as a playwright might. (His words appear in italics, which takes getting used to.) She does not disguise her admiration for Machiavelli and his ideas as she understands them. Nor does she hide personal flaws and intellectual inconsistencies that point to opposite conclusions, although a less committed writer might have brought them out with more force ... Despite its odd typography, Be Like the Fox can be read with pleasure by anyone interested in the craft of politics and the life of ideas.
Timothy Garton Ash
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAs Timothy Garton Ash makes admirably clear in his wise, up-to-the-minute and wide-ranging new survey, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, most of the difficult arguments about free speech bear on its price in terms of other things that also ought to matter to us...He writes with panache and understands the world he works in, especially the virtual world of the Net. Practical answers interest him more than doctrinal purity...Bewilderment is the easy option. Free Speech encourages us to take a breath, look hard at the facts and see how well-tried liberal principles can be applied and defended in daunting new circumstances.
