I can hardly post a book review in advance, but I can tell you about a book I mean to read as soon as I can get my hands on it. Neil Reynolds, writing in the Globe and Mail, alerts us to a new book by Kylie Minogue which I've immediately entered on my "must read" list.
Dr. Minogue is a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics. [I think you mean Dr. Kenneth Minogue, not Kylie. Ed.] Oh. Yes... Well, it'll be an easy name for me to remember when I visit the library.
Nearly 50 years ago, (Reynolds writes), Dr. Minogue published The Liberal Mind, his classic study of the dominant philosophy of the 20th century: radical niceness.
Rooted in extreme liberal optimism and salvationist aspiration, this triumphant ideology (Prof. Minogue said) tenaciously advanced the notion that history requires the perfection of human society, that governments – in pursuit of this perfection – are obliged “to provide every man, woman, child and dog with the conditions of the good life.” Prof. Minogue ended with a warning: “A populace which hands its moral order over to governments, no matter how impeccable its reasons, will become dependent and slavish.”
I see strong parallels with Godfrey Hodgson's America in Our Time, recommended here several times this summer. There is no bibliography in Mr. Hodgson's 1976 work, but I wouldn't be surprised if he owes a debt to Dr. Minogue.
Now the good doctor has published what Reynolds calls "a remarkable sequel": The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life. He picks up where he left off, documenting the ways in which democracy requires strict obedience to the state -- and to the bureaucratic moral order that sustains it.
Boy, does that ever ring true. Sounds to me like a tome that should be perused, if not read cover to cover, by libertarians everywhere.
You can read the column by Neil Reynolds here.
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