InternetPundit a new voice for the old right

Eco-nomics: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and the Environment by Richard L. Stroup. Softcover: 100 pages. (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2003.) Amazon Price: $9.95.

Eco-nomics: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and the Environment adroitly illustrates the vitality of market processes and private property rights while making it clear that the market is not incompatible with civil society's desire to protect the environment. Far from being detrimental to the environment, a liberal market economy, particularly over time, serves our societal goal of environmental protection. Stewardship capitalism works. Private property encourages good stewardship and accountability, and making more "commons" is not necessarily advantageous to cause of environmental protection by any means. Many laws have been enacted to preserve scenic natural beauty and prevent pollution, but such regulations often have unintended consequences.

Robert Nisbet: Communitarian Traditionalist (Library of Modern Thinkers by Brad Lowell Stone. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000.) Hardcover: 170 pages. $24.95.

Book Review by Ryan Setliff

Robert Nisbet : Communitarian Traditionalist is a biographical sketch about the life and essentially the ideas of this influential twentieth-century sociologist and social thinker. Sociology has long been the mainstay of statist liberals and radical collectivists, and Nisbet is definitely out of touch with the quixotic or authoritarian mindset of most sociologists. Brad Lowell Stone's research is highly recommended and an excellent overview of Nisbet's social thinking. It is prudent to read Nisbet's books in tandem with Stone's biography. Stone points out some of Nisbet's influences, which are rather fascinating. Nisbet was weaned on the writings of Southern Agrarians like Crowe, Ransom and Tate who penned I'll Take My Stand in the 1930s. Nisbet also gain insight from the late conservative luminary Russell Kirk, having read his book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot in 1953 the same year he wrote The Quest for Community. Since his assent in the 1950s, the late Robert Nisbet has gained recognition from both the Left and Right. Contemporaneously, his appeal is primarily with those on the Right whether traditionalist or libertarians. Nisbet's sociological thinking is aloof from the statist sociologists who often fail to distinguish between state and community. Essentially Nisbet made a dichotomy between monism and pluralism. The thought of Plato, Hobbes, Compte, Rousseau and Marx embodied monism, while Aristotle, Burke, and De Tocqueville represented the pluralist camp.

Pearce, Joseph, Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), Retail: $18.00, Amazon.com: $12.24.

Review by Ryan Setliff

Economics As If Families Mattered

Small is Still Beautiful is a less a biography of a man, and more the biography of one man's idea — namely the humane scale vision of economist E.F. Schumacher. Schumacher was born in Bonn, Germany in 1911, and himself the son of an economist and professor. In his youth, E.F. Schumacher studied in Bonn and Berlin in his native Germany. Later in went to England to study as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, before going to Columbia University in New York City where he earned his Economics degree. According to The Times Literary Supplement, his book Small is Beautiful is among the one-hundred most influential books published in the post-WWII era. Beginning with the publication of this book in 1971, Schumacher issued a clarion call for the world to wake up, and start humanizing its economic structures, rather than continue lurking blindly in the wrong direction of centralization, environmental degradation, globalization and obsessive pursuit of material wealth.

Roepke, Wilhelm, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, Hardcover: 261 pages, (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 3d. ed., 1998), Retail: $24.95, Amazon.com: $16.47.

Review by Ryan Setliff

A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market is an insightful look at the social and political framework of the market economy and an intellectual broadside against collectivism and state reckless state intervention in the economy. Economist Wilhelm Röpke was a brilliant German-born economic, social and political thinker, and perhaps my favorite amongst the so called "Austrian school." He devoted much of his scholarly career to combating the intellectual's obsession for collectivism in economic, social, and political theory. Röpke stands apart from his colleagues in that he thinks on a more humane level rejecting crude utilitarian calculations in favor of sound empirical reasoning and moral considerations rooted in culture.

This brilliant German economist of the "Austrian school" stood up to the centralising and dehumanising policies of the Nazis, and later the Soviets. Röpke boldly affirmed that collectivist ideologies lay waste to civil society, thus destroying the intermediary institutions between individual and state. When the omnipotent state acts to supplant the natural civil associations with state institutions that aggrandize state power, it dissolves the moral fabric of communities, saps a nation's economic vitality and usually leads to twin perils of centralisation and atomisation. Furthermore, Röpke was keenly aware of the limitations of the market economy, and was adamant that economic questions cannot be answered in a vacuum devoid of moral considerations. Röpke would attest that mammon is not the measure of all things. In his eyes, the intangibles — that is to say faith, family and tradition — are those things that animate life and give it meaning. Röpke recognised the limitations of the market economy. Röpke insisted, "Economism, materialism, and utilitarianism have in our time merged into a cult of productivity, material expansion, and the standard of living. This cult proves once again the evil nature of the absolute, the unlimited and the excessive" (p. 109). A humane economy was not grounded in progressive notions of unlimited growth, but in a realism that accentuated the recognition of the moral conditions necessary for sustaining a prosperous, free market economy. He observed,

Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work by Jennifer Roback Morse. Hardback: 300 pages. (Spence Publishing, 2001), Retail $27.95, Amazon.com: $19.84.

Review by Ryan Setliff

As the subtitle reveals, this book’s thesis is relatively straightforward: classical liberalism or libertarianism in its manifestation as a philosophy of individualism and rational autonomy simply does not work when applied to the family. The political Left tacitly endorses a hands-off philosophy at the family level, which emphasizes “freedom of choice” for the individual, while ironically favoring interventionist solutions for broader societal issues. Regrettably, in recent years, the political Right too, makes the lamentable mistake of applying their laissez-faire philosophy to the family, instead of just the marketplace and civil society in general.

Essentially, what author Jennifer Roback Morse attempts to illustrate with her book is that the advancement of libertarian philosophy might be useful and redeeming for broader economic and social freedom, but it cannot be applied to society’s most basic institution—the family. Moreover, the underlying materialism in liberal-libertarian circles has to be rejected in favor of an acknowledgement of a transcendent reality and the supernatural. This religious foundation is requisite in order to sustain the values necessary for the preservation of strong, stable traditional families. The laissez-faire family philosophy gained ascendancy following World War II and reached an ugly fruition in the post-1960s era that was host to the so called Sexual Revolution and the Feminist movement. It was reflected in the works of acclaimed pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock whose notoriety emanated from his permissive child-rearing and parenting books. As Norman Vincent Peale affirmed, “the United States was paying the price of two generations that followed the Dr. Spock baby plan of instant gratification of needs.” The narcissistic “Me Generation” of the 1960s has practically despoiled every subsequent generation of their inheritance—both cultural and spiritual.

Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence by Herbert Agar (Editor), Allen Tate (Editor), Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Mary Shattuck Fisher, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Cleanth Brooks, Lyle H. Lanier, Hilaire Belloc. Hardcover: 304 pages. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), Retail, $24.95, Amazon.com $15.72.

Review by Ryan Setliff
Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence was put together by a group of midwestern and southern agrarians thinkers who advance a sobering culture critique. Therein, they make the case for decentralised politics and widespread distribution of private property. The agrarians extoled the need for vibrant regionalism within the the nation-state. They recognized that one must surely be an Ohioan, Texan or Virginian as they are an American. This book was published in 1936 as the Great Depression become more depressing. This is the classic sequel to I'll Take My Stand, but the contributors frame their critique in national terms rather than southern sectional terms. It is an anthology that is a selection of articles and essays from various agrarian and conservative writers, mostly from the South and Midwest. Moreover, the contributing authors essentially represented a cross-section of thinkers from southern conservatives to Midwestern agrarians. They have much common ground, but some differences as well. There major focus in the book was a critique of American society, political economy and its increasingly centralized socio-economic-political structure.

The European Dream by Jeremy Rifkin. Hardcover: 448 pages. (New York, NY: Tarcher, 2004.) Amazon Price: $17.13.