Liberal West

For seven glorious years, Aaron Sorkin's masterpiece The West Wing served up a vision of American democracy and governance that informed us, challenged us and inspired us. In this collection of more than 20 essays, all prompted by memorable moments in the series, Scott Robinson surveys the issues, crises, and core principles of greatest impact, where the preservation and full realization of the American Experiment are concerned. Sorkin's vision was idealistic, to be sure, and the years since have been in many ways discouraging; but the perpetual light of The West Wing can continue to ...

In America and in England, faltering economies at home and failed wars abroad have generated a political and intellectual hysteria. It is a derangement manifested in a number of ways: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most informed of Anglo-America.

In Climbing Parnassus, winner of the 2005 Paideia Prize, Tracy Lee Simmons presents a defense and vindication of the formative power of Greek and Latin. He also shows how these languages have played a crucial role in the development of authentic Humanism, the foundation of the West's cultural...

The beginning of the 21st century has been marked by a quiet yet profound transformation of the international system. For decades after the end of the Cold War, a broad consensus took hold: the liberal global order—grounded in economic openness, interdependence, and the spread of democratic values—was not merely a historical phase, but the inevitable destination of world politics. Yet beneath that apparent stability lay structural tensions that, over time, began to erode its foundations. It is within this context that the figure of Donald Trump emerged. His political rise cannot be ...

When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against the Turks. The British supported the Arabs' fight for an independent state and sent an intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, to join Prince Faisal, leader of the Arab army and a descendant of the Prophet. In October 1918, Faisal, Lawrence, and the Arabs victoriously entered Damascus, where they declared a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. At the Paris Peace Conference, Faisal won the support of President Woodrow Wilson.

In the twenty-first century, the center of gravity of global power has begun to shift in a quiet yet irreversible way. For decades, the international order appeared structured around a single reference matrix: Western hegemony, economic liberalism, and the institutional architecture that emerged after the Second World War. Yet that equilibrium—once regarded by many as definitive—has entered a phase of profound transformation. In this transitional landscape, China has emerged not only as an economic power, but as an alternative political system that challenges the fundamental assumptions...

In 1927, classical liberalism, based on a belief in individualism, reason, capitalism, and free trade, was dying, when one of the 20th century's greatest social thinkers wrote this combative and convincing restatement. Nowhere are the key principles of Mises' philosophy better represented than in this timeless work. Mises was a careful and logical theoretician who believed that ideas rule the world, and this especially comes to light in Liberalism.

When justice is for sale, what remains of democracy? This book delves into the values of democracy, examining the troubling influence of money in politics and exposing how wealth can distort the system, manipulate social doctrines, and silence the common voice. It challenges us to confront inconvenient truths: Is power slipping away from the people? Are special interests taking control? Has it ever been different in contemporary history? What, if anything, is new? Can we respond and move toward a more authentic system? Can we build a true democracy, beyond mere words that serve as façades ...

“The best history of free speech ever written and the best defense of free speech ever made.”—P. J. O’Rourke Hailed as the “first freedom,” free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and...

A New York Times columnist and one of America’s leading conservative thinkers considers Pope Francis’s efforts to change the church he governs in a book that is “must reading for every Christian who cares about the fate of the West and the future of global Christianity” (Rod Dreher...

A large, widening gap has opened between Western democracies' international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support them. On issues ranging from immigration and international trade to national security, new political parties on the left and the right are rejecting the core foreign policy principles that Western governments have championed for over half a century. In Geopolitics and Democracy, Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon provide a powerful new explanation for the rise of anti-globalism in the West.

Democracy. It’s messy, it’s uncomfortable – but it’s better than the alternatives, as Winston Churchill famously assured us. And it is certainly better than Authoritarianism. The idea of a self-governing society, where all are considered equal, is humankind’s dream. It’s one of the things that makes The West Wing so attractive to its tens of millions of fans. The Bartlet Administration’s vision for America is practically utopian – based on the conviction that the best government is one in which no one – no one! – gets left behind. And especially now, as the opening ...

Political liberalism in Britain: the history of the Liberal Democrats and their predecessor parties, the Liberal Party and the SDP, from the earliest days of liberal thought in the 17th century to the Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition and the 2015 and 2017 elections.

Politics are a detail in the story of what we call ideology. After a six-year effort that involved three tours of the US, help from dozens of the world's top academic experts, and hundreds of interviews with conservatives, writer and researcher J. Scott Wagner brings us on a rollicking tour of the conservative mind, looking at them through the lens of five sciences: neurology/cognitive psychology, personality, bias, social conformity, and morality.

Bloomsbury presents Vexed written and read by James Mumford. Across the democratic West, politics has become deeply polarised and profoundly personal. Challenge someone’s political views and increasingly you challenge their very being. And yet, do our political tribes even make sense? Look...

Sheriff Gus knows it’s going to be a bad week when he sees Sedric Hedgecock’s breathalyzer score. With a blood alcohol level of 0.62 percent, Hedgecock should be dead. If the breathalyzer’s isn’t on the fritz, Hedgecock’s superhuman. Either way, he’s blind drunk, so off to the county jail he goes. Joining the wannabe Bacchus in Gus’s cells is Jennifer Louis Bachman, awaiting extradition to Kansas on a murder charge. The victim in question is Jennifer’s unborn child, and the murder weapon is an illegal Mexican abortion. With the governor vacillating on whether to extradite, ...