...is now available at The Objective Standard. I was appalled by this book, and I've distilled of my objections to it in this review. Excerpt:
Listing all the distortions and omissions in this book would grow tedious. Hitler’s name appears in only one sentence. She makes no references to Stalin, Mao, or the Gulag. Although she lauds Franklin Roosevelt for “believ[ing] in a broader conception of liberty” than his predecessors, she does not specify whether his “broader conception” was best represented by his policies of censorship, conscription, confiscation of property, persecution of political opponents, or the internment of Japanese Americans in prison camps. She does not even mention purely technical problems with majority rule, such as the Arrow Impossibility Theorem or the phenomenon of rent-seeking. The closest she comes to addressing such matters is when she resorts to sloganeering: “The danger of democratic despotism,” she says, can “best be combated with more democracy” (260). But that isn’t political philosophy—it’s a bumper sticker.
Comments policy