One of Proust’s great themes is the transformation of personality across time. Our earlier selves cannot begin to imagine our later selves; our later solves are baffled if not horrified by our earlier selves.  more

Bruce Bartlett’s latest work contains a spirited defense of the achievements of supply-siders. But Bartlett also wisely argues that supply-side economics is ill-suited for the problems of today.  more

Suppose you were born in the year 430 in one of the western provinces of the former Roman Empire – meaning that the overthrow of the last Roman emperor in the West occurred about midway through your life. What would you see and experience if you lived through “the fall of Rome”?  more

Chris Caldwell’s new book is at once urgent and subtle, alarming and profound. Caldwell’s subject is Muslim immigration to Europe. But is it really immigration? Immigration implies a departure from one society and acceptance of another. But what if the immigrant refuses to accept his new society’s norms and ways?  more

Edith Wharton seems at one point to have intended The Custom of the Country as a feminist novel, an expose of the harm done to women by their exclusion from public life. Published in 1913, the year of Wharton’s own divorce, the novel presents a world in which marriage is women’s only career – and personal display their only permissible field of competition.  more

Before signing onto plans for resurrecting the gold standard, intelligent conservatives would do well to grapple with the reasons for its overthrow.  more

To the extent that anybody remembers them at all, the Mugwumps of the 1870s and 1880s get predominantly negative press. Yet while as a movement for political power the Mugwumps failed, their ideas for reform overwhelmingly prevailed.  more

Robert Novak wrote Prince of Darkness (according to his publicity materials) to vindicate himself and to settle scores.  more

Negative reviews of Jude the Obscure so jolted Thomas Hardy that he left off writing narrative fiction ever after. When this story is usually told, much is made of the supposed squeamishness of Hardy’s Victorian contemporaries. One critic nick-named the novel, “Jude the Obscene.”   more

Conservatives famously champion what we call a “culture of life.” But how about a politics that is concerned with ensuring that as many Americans as possible are healthy?  more

Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s – the booming home of a glamorous new industry. But, Detroit’s fall was as steep and rapid as its rise.  more

A strong man in contention against the whole of the social, political, economic and sexual world – driven not only by greed for wealth and power but also by a desire to construct and create – this is Frank Algernon Cowperwood in the second half of his life.  more

Like the United States, France is a melting pot. But while on this side of the Atlantic newcomers came to the United States, on the other it was France that came to the newcomers. For three-quarters of a millennium, the kings of France pursued a policy of determined and generally successful expansionism.  more

Imagine an Ayn Rand novel written by a socialist, and you have some idea of the intellectual and moral universe of Theodore Dreiser’s trilogy of novels, The Financier, The Titan and The Stoic.  more

My AEI colleague Peter Wallison has cowritten one of those rare books that makes the lightbulb over one’s head go “ping!”

Wallison and co-author Joel Gora have taken on the vexed subject of campaign finance – a topic where every past reform has made things worse.   more

Americans do not easily imagine the Great Depression as a global event. Yet if asked for a short answer to the question, “What caused the Depression,” the best reply would be: “the First World War”. The war left every former belligerent except the United States desperately indebted. Germany and Austria, cut off from global finance,   more

Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny has sat atop the bestseller lists for many weeks. Clearly, conservatives across the country are finding meaning and value in this book. But what? Unlike Ann Coulter’s books, Liberty and Tyranny is not an exciting read. To his credit, Levin on the page eschews the vituperative style of his radio   more

In the quarter century from 1983 though 2008, Americans witnessed three stock market crashes: 1987, 1990 and 2000. The first of those crashes represented the sharpest one-day drop in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. Comparisons to 1929 obviously suggested themselves. But when no recession materialized – and the market quickly reversed itself   more

Over the past three years, three excellent and important new books have been published on the end of the Roman Empire – and by amazing happy coincidence the order in which they were published corresponds exactly to the order in which they should be read.
In 2005, the British archaeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkins published   more

“Nothing ever had brought home to her with such force as this death how little acquirements and culture weigh beside sterling personal character.”
So thinks young Grace Melbury, as she stands by the grave of her rejected suitor, Giles Winterborne, near the end of Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders.
Giles was an uneducated rustic, who earned his living   more