We are living in a great moment for readers (if not always for writers and publishers) of serious non-fiction books. I thought I’d bring to your attention, below the fold, four books published in the past few months that really highlight that in different ways, and that might be of particular interest to NRO readers: one about a great American statesman, one about a terrible American problem, and two books about other books (an especially valuable and underappreciated genre, I think).
First, while I’m certain I don’t have to tell National Review fans to read absolutely everything that Richard Brookhiser writes, I have to at least reinforce that healthy inclination now because his new book Founders’ Son is just glorious. There are mountains of books out there about Abraham Lincoln. He’s surely the most examined American statesman, and whenever a new book comes out you have to wonder what more could possibly be said. The answer often turns out to be “not much.” But once in a while (I think Rich Lowry’s book Lincoln Unbound was another recent instance, as was Lewis Lehrman’s Lincoln at Peoria) you run across a book that makes Lincoln’s story fresh again and gets at deeper truths beyond. Founders’ Son is an especially valuable book for people who want to think about how to learn from Lincoln because it is a book about how Lincoln learned from the American founders, how he was shaped by them, and how he made them relevant and important to the intense debates that shaped American life in his time. Like Brookhiser’s books about the founders themselves (Washington, the Adams family, Hamilton, Morris, and Madison), Founders’ Son is imbued not only with a love of America but also with a love of politics and an appreciation for its highs and lows—a view that makes him nearly unique among writers of popular history. Don’t miss it.
Second is Jay Cost’s powerful if depressing new book A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption. The title is (a little) more fatalistic than Cost’s actual argument, but the book is really a history of political corruption in America and an argument that such corruption is essentially unavoidable but grows worse as the role and power of the state grow larger. A government with the kind of power we have now turned over to ours is less of a republic and more of what Cost calls a “special-interest democracy.” The book is not a jeremiad, though. It’s a careful consideration of the institutional logic of our system of self-government and an extraordinarily interesting political history. And it will help you see why the struggle against cronyism and corruption is increasingly essential to the conservative project in America.
Third is a wonderful new interpretation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Russ Roberts of the Hoover Institution. Russ is the host of the not-to-be-missed weekly podcast “EconTalk” and a great translator of economic ideas into the language of everyday life, and this book is a prime example of how very valuable that skill can be. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is often overshadowed by Smith’s more famous book, The Wealth of Nations, but it is if anything an even greater intellectual achievement and also a foundation for that later book and for Smith’s economic thinking. It is a book of moral philosophy, a kind of Nichomachean Ethics for life in a liberal society, filled with sharp insights about psychology and sociology, and with advice (in a sense) about how to live in and think about a modern, free society. But it is not an easy book to read—systematic and over-thorough, it is much less accessible than the often engagingly written Wealth of Nations, and presents deeper and more complex ideas. Roberts’s book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, translates Smith into the terms and concepts of our day and brings him to life.
Roberts set out a very tough task for himself, and the book could easily have fallen into silliness, but instead it is a model of intelligent popularization and a great tool for teaching and learning. This book is also another encouraging sign of a new surge of interest in Smith. It’s a great companion for Nicholas Phillipson’s superb (if very academic) 2011 biography, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, and will, I gather, soon be joined on the Smith shelf by a new one-volume biography for general readers by Jesse Norman, the Conservative British MP and author of an excellent recent life of Edmund Burke.
Finally, another book about a book, and on a much less political and more important subject. James K.A. Smith, a philosophy professor at Calvin College, has written a brief little volume called How (Not) To Be Secular, that seeks to interpret and to make more accessible one of the most significant books so far published in this century: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is no doubt a little strange to write a book that interprets, or practically translates, for readers another book published just a few years ago (in 2007), but Taylor’s book both requires and deserves such treatment—it is extremely difficult (or at least I found it so), and profoundly important. It is so important because it offers a clarifying theory of the present and of how it came to be, arguing, perhaps most notably, that secularism should not be understood as the subtraction of religion from our understanding of the world but as the addition of a highly contrived frame around part of our world that seeks to cause us to treat a portion of reality as though it were the whole. Our secular society, including its religious members, generally lives inside that frame yet generally does not see it, and so takes it for granted—meaning, among other things, that our understanding of the relationship between secularism and religion is often upside-down. Taylor works through what this might mean for the future of religion in our secular age. (This is, needless to say, worse than a meager summary of just one of Taylor’s key arguments.)
Smith’s interpretation is valuable not only because it makes Taylor’s arguments clearer but also because it pushes back against Taylor in some key places, or at least I read it as pushing back—especially where Taylor leans toward the view that the process he describes somehow ultimately gives us greater access to religious truth. Both Taylor’s and Smith’s books are, of course, very Christian. I’m Jewish, but I found Smith’s book to be not only accessible but highly engaging, in parts even riveting. It is, as a teacher of mine used to say about such books, “a conversation intended for eavesdropping,” so while it is clearly written for Christian readers, it is highly instructive for anyone of any religion or none who is interested in the future of religion, and so in the future of humanity. (Christian readers might encounter the same experience in some modern Jewish books, like those of the great rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik.)
Four books, all published in the past year, all worthy of serious attention and capable of making us smarter. Maybe the Philistines haven’t quite won yet.