In Offended Freedom: The Rise of Libertarian Authoritarianism, two Swiss sociologists, Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey, indulge in a common academic habit: blaming libertarians for an intellectual and social phenomena that they find alarming. Their bill of particulars fails to stick because of conceptual incoherence, mistaking radical opposition to any government policy—even one that allows more liberty than […]
Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, by Clay Risen, Scribner, 480 pages, $31 Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter who has written several volumes of popular history, has now tackled the familiar story of the Second Red Scare—the period after World War II, when the nation’s institutions mobilized against the Communists believed […]
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…, by David Graeber, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages, $32 Long before European governments or their colonies began to embrace “democracy,” something far more democratic was widely practiced in the world’s vast ungovernable spaces. Black Sam Bellamy’s 1717 pirate crew was “a collection of people in which there […]