Right Books

■ Order! More a pamphlet than a book, Claes Ryn’s The New Jacobinism: Can Democracy Survive? (National Humanities Institute, 102 pp., $8.95) appears at first to be your standard conservative grieving over the death of the old ways—one man’s futile cry against the fates. The times are marked by “a flight from individual responsibility.” Among intellectuals, we find a “superficiality” and “frivolity,” a “moral flabbiness” all around. Politicians lack conviction. “Standards of personal behavior and comportment are falling.” Our dear old Western Civilization, in short, is winding down, and only a “reawakened awareness of personal character and responsibility” can save it.

The essay takes an unexpected turn, though, for among the “Jacobins” causing all this trouble we find not just the usual liberal riffraff. “It is indicative of the influence of the Jacobin spirit in the Western world,” writes Mr. Ryn, “that a fondness for abstract general schemes and utopian visions should today have attraction even for people said to be ‘conservative’ or on ‘the right.’ ” Endlessly browbeaten and caricatured by the liberalism of the day, conservatism’s “old beliefs undergo a subtle change.”

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National Review

■ Order! More a pamphlet than a book, Claes Ryn’s The New Jacobinism: Can Democracy Survive? (National Humanities Institute, 102 pp., $8.95) appears at first to be your standard conservative grieving over the death of the old ways—one man’s futile cry against the fates. The times are marked by “a flight from individual responsibility.” Among intellectuals, we find a “superficiality” and “frivolity,” a “moral flabbiness” all around. Politicians lack conviction. “Standards of personal behavior and comportment are falling.” Our dear old Western Civilization, in short, is winding down, and only a “reawakened awareness of personal character and responsibility” can save it.

The essay takes an unexpected turn, though, for among the “Jacobins” causing all this trouble we find not just the usual liberal riffraff. “It is indicative of the influence of the Jacobin spirit in the Western world,” writes Mr. Ryn, “that a fondness for abstract general schemes and utopian visions should today have attraction even for people said to be ‘conservative’ or on ‘the right.’ ” Endlessly browbeaten and caricatured by the liberalism of the day, conservatism’s “old beliefs undergo a subtle change.”