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After the Revolution |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Andrew E. Busch |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1997 |
| Size: 2,219 Words, 14,450 Characters |
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THE WORLD TURNED RIGHT SIDE UP
A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America
Godfrey Hodgson
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996
336 pp., $27.50
Godfrey Hodgson's The World Turned Right Side Up is a fascinating and readable, yet too often uneven, attempt to produce a grand history of the rise of conservatism in America. Its strengths lie in its broad survey of the varying intellectual components of American conservatism and in the provocative questions raised by the author. His analysis, however, grows weaker as it approaches the present.
Hodgson, the British author of America in Our Time and The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, seeks to accomplish two overriding purposes:
"to show how conservatism, a despised and impotent political philosophy at the end of World War II, proved to be a spectacular ideological "comeback kid"; and to inquire why, fifteen years after the triumph and triumphalism of the Reagan years, as the Republicans confront President Clinton, conservatism has proved, on the whole, so confusing and disappointing a guiding star for political action."
Hodgson begins by reviewing the intellectual underpinnings of American conservatism, with in-depth consideration of Friedrich Hayek, Albert Jay Nock, Ayn Rand, and Russell Kirk. Richard Weaver, Ludwig von Mises, and others are also brought into the picture. Hodgson effectively probes the nature of their ideas...
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...: bridging its divisions in the best spirit of democratic coalition-building, reversing most unpleasant economic trends, forcing the electoral debate to the right, and making a start at restoring the idea and then the practice of limited constitutional government? Hodgson does not have to tell us, though his book would be stronger if he did. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to decide. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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