Harry Miller's Blog, page 6
July 27, 2020
Book Review: Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, by Ronald J. Pestritto
In this book, Woodrow Wilson emerges as a relentless disparager of constitutional governance and an advocate for the modern administrative state. Viewing the Constitution through the prism of German historicism, Wilson asserted that it was merely a product of its time: The supposedly axiomatic conception of human nature that informed the founders’ drafting of it had become obsolete. Specifically, Wilson argued that the danger of faction, which the founders had taken to be ever-present and never-...
July 2, 2020
Book Review: Hard Times, by Vasily Sleptsov
The novel is set in the aftermath of serf emancipation in Russia, which, apparently, merely transformed the serfs into peons, because they had to pay onerous redemption levies and received very little of the best land to which they had once belonged. Worse, paternalism remained alive and well, as many of the newly emancipated peasants languished in some kind of dependent relationship with their erstwhile masters. Early in the book (pp. 36-39), when the ex-serfs of the “liberal” Shchetinin perfor...
