Books, Arts & Manners: The Conquest of Politics

experience in confusion and frustration.

Barber seems so anxious to preserve the legitimacy—and “sovereignty”—of public life that he never makes clear where private life can be clearly marked off, and protected, from political intrusion. It’s startling to find him complaining, late in the twentieth century, that life in our time is excessively “privatized.” He leaves crucial terms undefined: public, private, power, coercion. This allows him to equate certain kinds of what many people would call non-coercive pressure or influence with actual “private power,” thereby justifying state intervention. At times, with both Oakeshott and Nozick, he objects to certain ideas because of the consequences they’d lead to, such consequences always amounting to some libertarian state of affairs which he presumes his readers will agree is evidently undesirable, even intolerable. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that he may have readers who voted for Reagan or Thatcher and remain impenitent about it.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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experience in confusion and frustration.

Barber seems so anxious to preserve the legitimacy—and “sovereignty”—of public life that he never makes clear where private life can be clearly marked off, and protected, from political intrusion. It’s startling to find him complaining, late in the twentieth century, that life in our time is excessively “privatized.” He leaves crucial terms undefined: public, private, power, coercion. This allows him to equate certain kinds of what many people would call non-coercive pressure or influence with actual “private power,” thereby justifying state intervention. At times, with both Oakeshott and Nozick, he objects to certain ideas because of the consequences they’d lead to, such consequences always amounting to some libertarian state of affairs which he presumes his readers will agree is evidently undesirable, even intolerable. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that he may have readers who voted for Reagan or Thatcher and remain impenitent about it.