The Conservative Sensibility NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist an astonishing and enthralling Booklist new examination of how the Founders belief in natural rights created a great
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, an astonishing and enthralling Booklist new examination of how the Founders belief in natural rights created a great American political tradition easily one of the best books on American Conservatism ever written Jonah Goldberg For than four decades, George F Will has attempted to disce NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, an astonishing and enthralling Booklist new examination of how the Founders belief in natural rights created a great American political tradition easily one of the best books on American Conservatism ever written Jonah Goldberg For than four decades, George F Will has attempted to discern the principles of the Western political tradition and apply them to America s civic life Today, the stakes could hardly be higher Vital questions about the nature of man, of rights, of equality, of majority rule are bubbling just beneath the surface of daily events in America The Founders vision, articulated first in the Declaration of Independence and carried out in the Constitution, gave the new republic a framework for government unique in world history Their beliefs in natural rights, limited government, religious freedom, and in human virtue and dignity ushered in two centuries of American prosperity Now, as Will shows, conservatism is under threat both from progressives and elements inside the Republican Party America has become an administrative state, while destructive trends have overtaken family life and higher education Semi autonomous executive agencies wield essentially unaccountable power Congress has failed in its duty to exercise its legislative powers And the executive branch has slipped the Constitution s leash In the inte
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☆ The Conservative Sensibility ☆ George F. Will
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George F. Will
If there is anyone on Earth who can rationally explain the conservative movement in the USA, it is George Will Highly principled, extraordinarily erudite and calmly eloquent, Will has taken on this job love in The Conservative Sensibility There is an enormous amount of thought and analysis here Will deconstructs sentences, picks out individual words for scrutiny, and when necessary, looks at greater context Numerous paragraphs revolve around a single word from something someone said or wrote If [...]
The Conservative Sensibility is partly about the premises of American Conservatism, partly about George Will s personal opinions that have little to do with Conservatism The chapters that summarize the Conservative approach to civilization are beautiful we have Hayekian knowledge of the dangerous futility of statist fine tuning, we have the ageless genius of the founders vision based in natural rights, we have the role of American exceptionalism in a global world, etcetera These are grea [...]
This was probably the single greatest book on politics I have ever read The writing was amazing and it was packed with information You learn in one book as much as reading 4 or 5 books on politics history.I m not a fan or hater of Mr Will, I m slightly conservative but enjoy reading about everything The book was not polemical It s not like reading a book by Ann Colter or Rush Limbaugh It s about political philosophy and history It s not about convincing you to vote for so and so or b This was pr [...]
This book was revelatory and frustrating It s the most illuminating thing I ve read about American conservatism which Will describes as a sensibility rather than a philosophy or ideology It is also a sharp critique of progressivism, and effectively raises many of the contradictions of that sensibility, mostly around how entrusting government with power creates the potential for abuse This is a real issue, and isn t necessarily partisan Will s opposition to executive power is essentia This book w [...]
Most of this book was excellent The chapter on atheism was the weakest Mr Will s atheism seems to come cheaply and without the intellectual rigor of the rest of the book Without divine revelations, what difference does the answer was made or just happened really make p 457 It turns out quite a bit And Mr Will s failure to recognize that is a significant flaw A utilitarian argument for the exceptional natural rights Americans enjoy freedom of speech, religion, assembly, et Most of this book was e [...]
5 stars for anyone who wants some sense of what modern conservatism is, or should aspire to, at least as perceived by one of the leaders of the movement and a writer and commentator of massive intelligence The book is both descriptive and prescriptive offering a path though unlikely to be taken to saving the republic American conservatism has a clear mission It is to conserve, by articulating and demonstrating the continuing pertinence of, the Founders thinking The price of accuracy m 5 stars fo [...]
Governments do not exist to dispense rights, but to secure the natural rights that we hold by virtue of our humanity That proposition was the intellectual foundation of the Founders when establishing our country in the late eighteenth century Over the past century, though this and other founding principles have undergone a steady erosion In The Conservative Sensibility, George Will makes the case for a return to the classical liberalism of the Founding.Will describes how our founding princi Gove [...]