Books, Arts & Manners: The Good Fight

Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America, by Marvin Olasky (Crossway, 316 pp., $23)

MARVIN Olasky’s title and subtitle offer a 13-word summary of his book’s argument. Mr. Olasky, a favorite thinker of Newt Gingrich, surveys the run-up to the American Revolution and the political struggles of the new country’s first quarter-century, and sees, where others have seen wrangles for money or empire, a straightforward struggle for freedom and morality. Britain’s imperial establishment of the eighteenth century was tyrannical and vicious, which is the natural tendency of all centralized states. When the Americans replaced the Articles of Confederation with a more centralized Constitution, they started themselves down the same road.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America, by Marvin Olasky (Crossway, 316 pp., $23)

MARVIN Olasky’s title and subtitle offer a 13-word summary of his book’s argument. Mr. Olasky, a favorite thinker of Newt Gingrich, surveys the run-up to the American Revolution and the political struggles of the new country’s first quarter-century, and sees, where others have seen wrangles for money or empire, a straightforward struggle for freedom and morality. Britain’s imperial establishment of the eighteenth century was tyrannical and vicious, which is the natural tendency of all centralized states. When the Americans replaced the Articles of Confederation with a more centralized Constitution, they started themselves down the same road.