Briefly Noted

 Just the Facts, Jack!

Thomas Sowell.  Intellectuals and Society, Basic Books, 2009. 398 pgs.  Index. Hardcover 29.95.

If you look at any Thomas Sowell book you will conclude that he is a good writer. He is clear and organized and surprises the already well-informed reader on almost every page. This new book is one of the most satisfying of his works that we have read. His facts are solid and his logic is irrefutable. He offers separate chapters on economics, social vision, media and academia, law, war and society. His approach is purely common sense without ever stepping back to formulate a theoretical expression of the meaning of events—a lack that may disappoint some Voegelinians. The approach is complimentary to Voegelinian analysis but sometimes frustrating. His grasp of law and economics is sure. Here is a typical observation:

. . . . under new economic policies beginning in the 1990s, tens of millions of people in India have risen above that country's official poverty level. In China, under similar policies begun earlier, a million people a month have risen out of poverty. Surely anyone concerned with the fate of the less fortunate would want to know how this desirable development came about for such vast numbers of very poor people — and therefore how similar improvements might be produced elsewhere in the world. But these and other dramatic increases in living standards, based ultimately on the production of more wealth, arouse little or no interest among most intellectuals. (p 165)

 

Highly enjoyable reading. 

Book Review

by John von Heyking

It's the Regime, Stupid!: A Report from the Cowboy West on Why Stephen Harper Matters, by Barry Cooper.  Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2009. 279 pp. Hardcover. $21.95.

Only a political theorist like Barry Cooper could peer into the heart of darkness that is the 1970s Calgary punk rock scene and divine the rotten spiritual core of the Canadian establishment. Combining philosophical, literary, and historical analysis, social science, and personal anecdote, Cooper analyzes the “logic” of the Canadian “regime,” which, borrowing from Plato and Aristotle, includes not only the offices and laws of a nation, but also its way of life, and with it the moral character types the regime calls forth to rule it. While the book focuses on Canada, Cooper’s analysis shows how Canada’s regime is in many ways typical of all modern regimes, since the end-point of Canada’s regime is in a sense the endpoint of a fault-line in modernity.

Since the 1950s, Canadians and their leaders have ignored basic aspects of their constitution to override the distinction between federal and provincial responsibility, and the distinction between political representatives and bureaucrats.  The result is a bloated “embedded state” that, instead of helping people out (the purported function of welfare), has created a culture of entitlements that has transformed what is left of citizenship into a “culture of grasping and seizing” (41).  Canadians and foreign observers used to viewing Canada as a “kindler and gentler” America will be surprised to see how the embedded state’s top-heavy attempt to create political friendship has left Canadians fragmented, dispirited, and resentful.  All the incentives are in grasping for the levers of power.

Book Review

by John von Heyking

The Philosopher and the Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth Century Literature   by Charles R. Embry, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2008). 192 pp.  US $34.95.

Charles Embry has edited the correspondence between Eric Voegelin and Shakespeare scholar and literary critic, Robert Heilman.¹ If one compares the contents of that correspondence with the correspondence published in the two large volumes published as part of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, one notices that Heilman was perhaps Voegelin’s only American correspondent with whom he sustained high level philosophical discussion over many years.²  Several of Voegelin’s letters with Heilman are mini essays and, indeed, the one on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw was published separately thanks to Heilman's urging.

Contained within this correspondence are letters discussing a myriad of literary and philosophical topics. When read together they paint a portrait of Voegelin’s understanding of literature, including how best to read it. Embry’s book, The Philosopher and the Storyteller, sets out the insights gleaned from this correspondence, and taking this together with Voegelin’s philosophical writings, Embry develops an account of philosophy and storytelling under the heading “The Time of the Tale,” a concept which Voegelin had refined over many years. The Philosopher and the Storyteller is a report of Embry’s journey with his two teachers, and includes not only an account of philosophy and storytelling, but also of three novels that in one way or another manifest both the “Time of the Tale” and serve as examples of the deformation of reality.

Book Review

  by Robert Cheeks

Hannah Coulter By Wendell Berry.Shoemaker and Hoard (imprint of Avalon Publishing Group,Inc., New York), 186 pp., hardbound, paperback and audio CD and web download, 2004-2008.

The rise of techno-capitalism has signaled the triumph of the “bourgeois family” and the demise of the “traditional” family. Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas said that economist Adam Smith was well aware that the “weakening of familial ties would increase the necessity of sympathy between strangers and result in cooperative forms of behavior that had not previously been realized.” Commenting on Hauerwas’s statement, Professor David Crawford of the John Paul II Institute for the Studies on Marriage and family said, “It is not that families would cease to exist, but they would be transformed into the image of the exchange relations that underlie liberal societies."¹