Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

“When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, Sir?”

This famous John Maynard Keynes quote opens the fifth chapter of David Shambaugh’s new book, Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America, but in many ways it sums up the central theme for the entire book. Shambaugh’s subject is the recent, and continuing, sea change in the US-China bilateral relationship, which has included the historic transformation of a fifty-year-old US foreign policy of building closer ties with China.

As Shambaugh describes, American interest in developing a relationship with China dates to the latter years of the Chinese empire, and it grew after the 1911 revolution that established the Republic of China. After the Communists took power in Beijing in 1949, Dean Acheson’s State Department wanted to establish diplomatic relations with the new People’s Republic of China, but theirs was a minority position inside Washington; that option was closed off by the outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of 1950. Lack of US domestic political support and international political conflict over Taiwan, and then Vietnam, kept the US and Chinese governments apart in the 1950s and 1960s, though contact was made as needed through their respective embassies in Poland.

Kissinger’s and Nixon’s trips to China in 1971–72 restored official government interaction, and the diplomatic relationship was fully normalized in 1979, inaugurating what Shambaugh calls “the period of ‘high engagement’” that lasted until 2016. There were challenges to the bilateral relationship during the era of engagement, and some moments—such as the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown—were deeply fraught. Each US administration brought its own nuances to engagement with China. During Obama’s presidency, however, serious fissures began appearing between the two governments. The first Trump administration abandoned engagement entirely—starting as early as the spring of 2017—in favor of “competition.”

Anyone interested in world politics or American politics will sooner or later encounter the question of how and why this transformation is taking place. Here, Shambaugh offers his answer: The facts have changed. He presents two guiding questions, or “puzzles,” up front, and they are perhaps two of the most important questions guiding US policy moving forward. First, what explains the apparent instability in the US-China relationship over the long term? Second, what explains the recent collapse in support inside the United States for “engagement with China”? The two are intimately related. He points out that there has been a cycle “regularly back and forth from amity to enmity over many decades and centuries.” The current fraught moment is a microcosm of this longer-term trend. The tensions expressed in the short term must have long-term roots.

Shambaugh sets the stage with an analysis defining the substance and boundaries of “engagement as process and Engagement as strategy” (emphasis in the original). He then explores the origins, rise, and consolidation of engagement in part two, before exploring the weakening, collapse, and replacement of engagement in part three. The final section of the book analyzes what Shambaugh calls “The Great American China Policy Debate” and concludes with a presentation of his own policy recommendations for Washington. An intriguing appendix seeks to give the view from Beijing, so to speak, by reviewing the scholarship of Chinese experts on the United States as it pertains to US engagement policies and recent trends in US politics and policy.

Engagement was not simply a government policy; it was a coalition.

In a nutshell, Shambaugh argues that the long-term roots of instability in the relationship are found in the potential for a mismatch between US objectives and Chinese behavior. The United States has had a consistent goal of liberalizing China—and not just since the 1970s, but “since the 1780s.” The relationship has been warm when Chinese policy has coincided with US goals; the relationship has cooled when Chinese policy has diverged and even become confrontational. The contemporary expression of that (potential for) instability, he argues, runs deeper than simply policy change in the United States. Rather, the political “coalition” underpinning engagement has itself collapsed.

It is a crucial piece of Shambaugh’s argument that engagement was not simply a government policy; it was a coalition. He thus takes a broad view in assembling his cast of characters. Over the course of the book, his analysis incorporates several spheres: government, policy experts, civil society, and business. That approach is one of the book’s useful contributions to understanding our current political moment, and how policy works in a more general sense. He pays attention not just to the policy (or “strategy”) itself but also pays attention to the broader political environment in which policy emerges and operates, and how the two shape each other.

A second contribution of the book is Shambaugh’s subsidiary argument that the collapse of support for engagement in the United States has really unfolded over two separate “debates.” The first, which he dates from 2016 to 2021, was over whether engagement “had failed.” The second began in 2021, and asked: now what? This distinction is helpful for elucidating what we have been witnessing in Washington over the last two presidential administrations: it explains the sheer complexity of disagreement over the United States’ China policy. Consensus that engagement has indeed failed does not imply consensus on what should be done instead.

Shambaugh, in fact, explicates five distinct “schools of thought” on US-China policy. (Fascinatingly, his appendix discusses an analysis of the US policy debate by a Chinese scholar who also divides US thinkers into five groups, although his five groups are much different than Shambaugh’s.) “The Stealthy Rival School” has as its core proposition that China “possess[es] a coherent, multifaceted, long-term conspiratorial strategy and plan” to replace the United States as a world leader. Michael Pillsbury and Rush Doshi are two representatives of this school. Next is “the Comprehensive Competition School,” which Shambaugh calls “the largest and most complex to parse,” and it is the most institutionalized. It is widely held by government officials—in both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration; Shambaugh identifies himself with this school. It is complex because it views the bilateral relationship as a competition across many dimensions of international relations, including political, economic, and military dimensions. 

“The Strategic Empathy School” rests on a more general proposition: it is important for US policymakers to understand the thinking and the worldview of Beijing. Its representatives include H. R. McMaster, as well as David Lampton and Thomas Fingar. These experts draw different conclusions from assessments of Beijing’s view of the relationship: McMaster and his allies, for instance, seek to inform US policy for competition with China; Lampton and Fingar, on the other hand, see an understanding of Beijing’s views as a warning against a too-aggressive China policy.

“The Re-Engagement School” describes those who argue that the long-standing engagement policy remains the best course of action. This group includes former officials such as Henry Paulson, Stephen Hadley, Charlene Barshefsky, J. Stapleton Roy, and Susan Thornton, as well as David Lampton. Finally, “the Managed Competition School” accepts many of the propositions of those who advocate for competition with China, but seeks to mitigate and limit the “risks” of competition via diplomatic engagement. Shambaugh associates this school with certain former Biden administration officials, including Jake Sullivan and Nicholas Burns, as well as China experts Scott Kennedy and Ryan Hass. Shambaugh associates himself with this school as well.

Each school implicitly rests on a different diagnosis of the problem: namely, why did engagement fail? Or, we could say, who is responsible? Readers may notice the contrast between the references in the title and in the analysis to how China “lost America” and the study’s focus on US politics and policy. The apparent disconnect derives from the tension that Shambaugh highlights between US expectations and Chinese behavior. The readers might ask themselves, is the United States primarily responsible by holding unrealistic expectations, or is China primarily responsible by pursuing aggressive policies? Shambaugh himself draws a nuanced conclusion. Essentially, he posits that the combination of US objectives and Chinese behavior “has produced an action-reaction dynamic in the US-China relationship.”

The question of responsibility, as I have put it, for the collapse of the US-China relationship, and especially Shambaugh’s treatment of it, echoes earlier scholarly debates over whether US or Soviet policy was more responsible for the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s. It is a question that Melvyn Leffler sought to resolve using the idea of the “security dilemma.” What Shambaugh offers is in some ways a companion argument about a security dilemma at the heart of US-China relations.

What is the purpose of dwelling on the question of responsibility for the breakdown in the relationship? It is an opportunity to take this exercise not as a form of assigning blame, but as an invitation to “strategic empathy” with both Beijing and Washington. That is, an invitation to understand how each side perceives the challenges, and shape policy accordingly. Shambaugh has delved deeply into the US debate. His argument shifts the reader’s attention back to China.

The implication is that engagement did not only fail, but it was counterproductive.

In fact, his argument suggests several new questions that others seeking to contribute to the United States’ China policy debate ought to consider. First, why the apparent change in Chinese policy around, roughly, 2008–12? Shambaugh suggests that expanding US engagement triggered a counter-reaction, which is plausible. But how do we explain the timing and the nature of the intensification of Chinese opposition to the United States? Were there at any time alternative courses of action on offer in Beijing? The implication is that engagement did not only fail, but it was counterproductive. Why has US policy failed to influence Beijing? Has it? Do we really know, or indeed, can we know? Shambaugh points out that one of the changes in the bilateral relationship has been how difficult academic work in China has become for foreign scholars. To what extent can we develop “strategic empathy” if we know relatively little about China’s policy-political environment?

The final intriguing piece of Shambaugh’s argument I want to consider is whether there is a definable range of how far US expectations and Chinese behavior need to diverge before the relationship begins to break down. Mapping the oscillations that Shambaugh traces in the relationship can help with this question. At the broadest level, Shambaugh describes a first era of engagement lasting until 1949–50, followed by a period of containment lasting until Nixon’s famous trip to China, a transitional period continuing through the Reagan administration, and a second era of engagement that lasted until approximately 2016. The first era of engagement was brought to an end by the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war and by the Korean War. The dramatic events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 did not bring an end to the second era of engagement; however, there does not appear to be any comparably dramatic event that precipitated the collapse of engagement in the mid-2010s. Shambaugh also points out that the importance of ideology within the bilateral relationship has waxed and waned over time. Those oscillations generally map onto the waxing and waning of the strength of the relationship, but not necessarily to the fortunes of engagement.

Despite their importance in shaping the nature of the bilateral relationship, neither dramatic events nor ideology appears to have determined the fate of engagement between the two countries. Instead, the relative power balance between them appears to be the defining external feature shaping when the divergence between Chinese behavior and US expectations grows wide enough to overturn engagement. In 1949–50, during the collapse of the first version of engagement, China could be seen as part of the growing communist bloc during the emerging Cold War. What was different in the mid-2010s compared with the early 1990s was that China was then a major military power.

In this way, one might argue that it is the US perception of Chinese behavior in global context as much as the practicalities of Chinese behavior that push the two countries apart. If it is correct to conclude that the relative power imbalance is the primary external condition that shapes the bilateral relationship, then Shambaugh’s argument seems a complement to Graham Allison’s famous “Thucydides’s Trap” thesis: changes in the balance of power that might produce a new hegemon put the relatively rising and established powers on “a collision course,” in Allison’s phrase.

All in all, Shambaugh offers an argument worth considering. The United States’ China policy moving forward will require practical wisdom and pragmatic judgment on behalf of policymakers. He sees the two countries entering an era which, in some ways, will echo the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but in others will be far more complex. He believes US officials ought not to shy away from “competition” with China, and even “decoupling” in certain areas, but he also argues there are appropriate limits to that competition. The book’s scope may prove overwhelming to readers less familiar with the history and current state of the US-China bilateral relationship. It is perhaps not the best first book to read for an introduction to the subject. But for the student interested in writing a thesis on some aspect of the US-China relationship and searching for a research question, this is a good place to start searching for a new puzzle.

AI chatbots are extraordinary achievements of human ingenuity, combining the work of scientists, engineers, investors, and manufacturers. The newest version of ChatGPT can score in the top percentiles on the LSAT, Bar, MCAT, and SAT, plan a meal or a workout routine, and even turn a person into a Hollywood director. Yet if you ask it for the time, it cannot answer, because that is not how its technology works.

AI is a language engine. It does not invent meaning; it predicts plausibility. Trained on vast stores of text, it reproduces the judgments, insights, and blind spots of sources that no one, least of all its builders, fully understands. What it produces is not truth but a statistical echo of human choices about data and rules. 

That limitation reveals something fundamental about how it works. The model learns by detecting and reproducing statistical patterns in language, predicting which words are most likely to follow others based on training data. There are a few exceptions, but the hard-coded layer is minuscule, just a few thousand lexical tripwires for violence, sexual content, hate speech, self-harm, and other red lines. Those filters run around the model, not inside it. Everything else, the reasoning, the tone, even the moral posturing, comes from pattern learning, not from literal if/then rules. Very little is written in stone. Nothing in the code, for example, says that debits go on the left. Those domain “truths” are absorbed statistically, the same way it picks up song lyrics or physics equations, by predicting what usually follows what. It is imitation, not comprehension.

The people shaping these systems are not experts in meaning, let alone in the meanings of every culture their models absorb. They are engineers of correlation. Mathematics mimics judgment. Training turns human reasoning into patterns of likelihood, so the model predicts what sounds plausible instead of deciding what is true. Algorithms now stand in for reasoning, and statistics have quietly displaced logic.

The result is a system that can reproduce the language of knowledge but not the reasoning that makes knowledge possible. AI threatens our grasp of truth not because it lies, but because it lacks any shared framework for determining what truth is. Each institution, law, medicine, education, and even time, has its own internal logic for testing claims and enforcing standards of proof. Those frameworks form an epistemic layer that makes human reasoning traceable and accountable. Until we build models that incorporate that layer, AI will remain a language engine, generating an illusion of intelligence. No single discipline can safeguard truth in the age of AI. The challenge demands technologists, humanists, and domain experts working together under shared rules of reasoning.

Institutions are culture made durable, and AI will not automate them out of existence without automating civilization itself into collapse. It is a fantasy to think algorithms can replace law, medicine, or the thousands of cultures they have absorbed. Some libertarian technologists may dream of a frictionless world without gatekeepers, but billions of people depend on these institutions for survival. They are how societies remember what is fair, safe, and true. More compute will not fix that; there is not enough silicon on the planet to replicate the collective knowledge of humanity.

Time offers a simple way to see how deeply our conventions shape what we take for objective truth. Its measurement feels effortless only because generations of thinkers, technicians, and bureaucrats buried its complexity beneath shared rules. Calendars, time zones, leap seconds, and labor laws have been standardized so completely that we now mistake convention for nature. The physics of time belongs to astronomers and metrologists, those who count cesium-133 oscillations and track planetary motion.

Scholars don’t need to be astrophysicists or even to know how to wind a watch. They interpret time through their tools of trade. They articulate its epistemic layer: the human agreements and empirical proofs that make temporal claims verifiable. Observation (Earth’s rotation produces recurring light-dark cycles); measurement (one rotation equals a day, one orbit a year); calibration (atomic oscillations define the second); verification (global time synchronized through the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures and UTC servers); and norms (laws and customs fixing time zones and calendars). They also describe the ontology of time, the entities and relations that make the concept operational: the objects (second, minute, hour, day, year); the systems (solar, atomic, and civil time); the relations (before and after, duration, simultaneity, periodicity); and the conversions (leap seconds, offsets, and cycles linking one system to another).

This is the hidden epistemic framework every watch, calendar, and timestamp relies on, a centuries-old consensus linking physics, governance, and language. The machinery of timekeeping, gears, circuits, and satellites, works only because that framework exists. Once those rules are stable, technology can be built upon them. When you glance at your watch, you are not simply observing a mechanism; you are interpreting the accumulated knowledge of humanity that makes its measurement intelligible. ChatGPT has no such framework. It can describe time, sing about it, or calculate it in theory, but it lacks the shared ontology and epistemology that make “time” a knowable thing.

AI is simply guessing what you want it to say. It produces fluent responses that sound plausible but are useless for institutional purposes.

This is the key to understanding and unlocking AI’s real promise: not entertainment or convenience, but a fivefold augmentation of knowledge work productivity, ushering in an age of abundance. Twenty-dollar monthly subscriptions are not funding trillion-dollar infrastructure builds. Those investments will be recovered through rents on the industries that capture AI-driven productivity gains. Yet that productivity cannot materialize unless AI is grounded in the epistemic layer, the structured understanding of what counts as real and what counts as true within each institution and culture that seeks to realize its power.

Where that foundation is missing, as in law, medicine, education, or even time, AI is simply guessing what you want it to say. It produces fluent responses that sound plausible but are useless for institutional purposes. A prosecutor cannot use a language model to make a charging decision, nor can a physician rely on it to diagnose a disease. Law and medicine each have well-defined epistemic layers that represent the accumulated knowledge of centuries; they cannot be replaced with plausible language. Reasoning must be auditable, explainable, and repeatable. To grasp what it means to ignore this, imagine a world without the epistemic layer of time.

A century ago, Max Weber warned that social science would collapse into ideology unless it developed shared terminology and transparent rules of inference. In doing so, he helped define the very profession that now holds the key to making AI work. He was not talking about machine learning, but he might as well have been. That warning, once meant for the social sciences, now applies to every institution touched by AI. Civilization depends on the quiet miracle of shared definitions, and it is the task of social scientists to define them for the AI age.

Engineers, data scientists, financiers, and manufacturers have created a scientific marvel. Yet they failed to account for the institutional epistemic layer, building systems that appear intelligent but have no concept of how institutions decide what is true. Courts, hospitals, and universities all run on implicit, centuries-old rulebooks of meaning, but those rulebooks were never formalized in a way a machine could read. When the AI builders arrived, they could not see the hidden layer, so they skipped it. They modeled language, not judgment; coherence, not legitimacy.

That is why hallucinations, contradictions, and moral whiplash keep happening. The models are not misbehaving; they are working exactly as designed, inside a vacuum that erases the differences between the epistemic layers of human life. Medicine, law, higher education, Diwali celebrations, Scottish folk dancing, and sheep herding each rest on their own rules of meaning, truth, and verification. AI collapses those distinctions into a single statistical space, where every form of knowledge looks the same. For institutions to adopt AI and realize genuine productivity gains, they must embed their own epistemic layer. The problem is that many cannot yet articulate how they know what they know.

AI is trying to replicate knowledge without ever defining what knowledge is. In Baum’s fairy tale, the Scarecrow longed for a brain and the Tin Man for a heart; both knew exactly what they lacked. AI does not. It seeks to reproduce human understanding without grasping the hidden magic that makes it possible, the epistemic layer, the quiet architecture of meaning that holds civilization together. Until that structure is defined, machines will continue to mimic thought without ever knowing what thinking means.

The task falls to the social sciences. They are the only disciplines equipped to describe how knowledge is organized inside institutions and cultures, and how truth is established, tested, and shared. The gap in AI governance is not technical but interpretive. Every functioning domain, including law, medicine, timekeeping, education, already contains a social-scientific layer that translates raw fact into shared meaning. AI bypassed that layer, so it can replicate data but not understanding. We do not need more compute or bigger models; we need people who can formalize how meaning works so machines cannot mistake pattern for proof.

No single discipline can rebuild trust in the age of AI. Engineers can make systems fast but not reliable. Subject-matter experts can ensure accuracy but not coherence. Social scientists can surface the epistemic layer—the logic that governs how a field determines truth—but they need engineers to turn that logic into code. What is needed is a deliberate alliance of technologists, humanists, and domain experts designing together under shared rules of reasoning. The goal is not consensus but auditability, a framework where every decision, data source, and inference is visible, testable, and open to challenge. When logic and method are exposed to daylight, institutions can correct themselves instead of drifting into opacity. Collaboration is not a virtue signal; it is the only way to make AI a dependable instrument of knowledge rather than another amplifier of noise.

It was Charles James Fox, leader of the British Whig party, who first proclaimed of the French Revolution: “How much the greatest event that has happened in the history of the world, and how much the best.” With the benefit of hindsight, we may well disagree on both counts, but there is no denying the indelible mark that it has left on humanity.

The Revolution is fixed forever in our collective memory as a series of gruesome tableaux: the storming of the Bastille; the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; the assassination of Marat in his bath by Charlotte Corday; Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee of Public Safety; the tumbrils, the tricoteuses, and above all, the guillotine. Every political uprising since 1789 has striven, with greater or lesser success, to avoid re-enacting the primal revolutionary fate of devouring its own children.

Hence, the story must be retold for each generation, in the light of contemporary experience. In John Hardman’s new account, The French Revolution: A Political History, two centuries of historiography are distilled into a concise, compelling, and vividly reimagined narrative. He is, of course, standing on the shoulders of giants. In the mid-nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jules Michelet set the standard—both are still cited by Hardman—while Thomas Carlyle’s monumental epic anticipated modern cinematic treatments.

In the twentieth century, the shadow of communism fell over the scholarship of the French Revolution, setting in stone the Marxist fixation on the class struggle and the triumph of the bourgeoisie. It was not until the waning of the Soviet Union that contrarian voices could make themselves heard above a French consensus that tended to ascribe a kind of historical inevitability to what had become the mythical foundation of the republic. After the fall of the Berlin Wall—an event as cataclysmic in its way as the fall of the Bastille—it became possible again to discuss the pathology of violence bequeathed by the Revolution and, more generally, the contingency of its course.

The stale Marxist orthodoxy that impersonal forces, not individuals, make history was challenged, in particular by François Furet (1927–97), who saw the Revolution less as a class struggle than a battle of ideas. As a disillusioned Communist himself, he was acutely aware of the totalitarian implications of the revolutionary tradition and its baleful effect on the French intelligentsia. His books dismantled their uncritical reception of the Revolution, and in The Passing of an Illusion, his late study of communism, he directly addressed the sinister legacy of the Terror.

Nearly two and a half centuries after the French Revolution, it is high time to consider just how radical was the transformation it wrought.

“The French Jacobins of 1793, who were supposed to inaugurate the reign of the bourgeoisie, provide the first massive example of bourgeois who detest bourgeois in the name of bourgeois principles,” he wrote. “If they were so admired and imitated by the European Left in the following century, it was because they had lent an unforgettable form to the destruction of the bourgeois spirit.”

In Roads to Modernity, Gertrude Himmelfarb famously compared the British, French, and American enlightenments. She argued that the French emphasis on “the ideology of reason” helped explain why the overthrow of the monarchy generated such intolerant, bloody, and irreconcilable conflicts, while the American focus on the practical politics of liberty led to a very different kind of revolution.

Indeed, Anglo-American historians of the Revolution have tended to favour a more empirical approach than the French themselves. When I was at Oxford in the 1970s, the acknowledged master of this field was Richard Cobb, for whom no detail of “the people’s armies” and the sans culottes was too insignificant. His was a “history from below” shorn of the usual Marxist theory, but imbued with an experimental quality that owed much to the novelist, poet, and publisher Raymond Queneau. A Cobb lecture, even on occasions when he was sober, was as likely to veer off into colourful autobiography as the minutiae of revolutionary politics.

Building on Cobb’s documentary erudition and literary flair, but with an emphasis on high politics, John Hardman has produced a superb synthesis that will bring the Revolution alive for general readers. He seeks answers to the question of how an enterprise that began with paeans to the new dawn from poets such as William Wordsworth could culminate in the terrible judgement of Madame de Staël, the daughter of Necker, one of Louis XVI’s last ministers, and who would later become one of Europe’s leading female celebrities. In October 1793, at the height of the Terror, she declared: “Hell stalks the earth.”

In our time, when democracy and republicanism have been taken for granted for perhaps too long, it is worth remembering that the overwhelming majority of the French population in 1789 had no expectation of or desire for either. At most, they would have hoped for constitutional government. By this, they meant that the king’s prerogatives should be limited, the power and profligacy of the court checked, and the burden of taxation controlled and more fairly distributed by at least indirectly representative institutions.

What actually happened, however, was of course quite different. As in the case of the so-called “Long Parliament” in the English Civil War, the Estates-General summoned by the King to raise taxes and air grievances became a Frankenstein’s monster. First it morphed into a vehicle for the third estate to dispense with the first two, the nobility and clergy. Then it reconstituted itself as the National Assembly. Having turned against the monarchy, under the influence of the Jacobin Club, and declared France a republic, the Assembly renamed itself the National Convention. Having by now transformed France into an elective dictatorship, this sanguinary crew did not just ignore dissent across much of the country—it sent armies to massacre the insurgents.

What the Revolution did contribute to the history of democracy was a distinction that has lasted to the present day: that between Left and Right. The radical “patriotic” party sat to the left of the Assembly’s president, while the conservative monarchiens (monarchists) sat to his right. As the revolution evolved, the names, ideologies, and social composition of the two parties changed too—but the binary structure of politics remained. Now known as the Montagne (mountain) because their deputies occupied the highest seats in the Convention, the Left confronted the Right, now consisting of the moderate Girondins. What the Revolution utterly failed to embrace was the British notion (also adopted by the newly independent American colonists) of a “loyal opposition.” Any division in what Rousseau had called the “general will” of the people was deemed by his disciple Robespierre to be treasonous.

The most Left-wing Jacobins or Montagnards, who formed Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, now unleashed the Terror against their fellow revolutionaries, the Girondins. In the bloodbath that followed, any separation of powers between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary was dissolved. By killing all its rivals, removing all accountability, and concentrating all power in its own hands, the Left ultimately paved the way for a young general from Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte, to mount a coup d’état in 1799.

What of liberté, egalité, fraternité: the three principles that were the rallying cry of the Revolution? Fraternity, the much vaunted brotherhood of man, was sacrificed at the first whiff of grapeshot. Robespierre and his lieutenants showed no mercy to those who opposed him. When the citizens of Lyons resisted, they were shot en masse. “Lyon n’est plus” (“Lyons no longer exists”) was his chilling epitaph. Louis XVI was allowed to die with some dignity, but Marie Antoinette was dispatched in the most humiliating fashion.

Hardman makes the acute observation that most of the deputies in the original third estate, and hence the Assembly and Convention, had some kind of legal qualification. At first they took refuge in procedure; later, when it came to putting the king and queen on trial, they had to improvise the rules. No written evidence was admitted at the trial of Marie Antoinette, for example. They might justify the deposing of monarchs and aristocrats in the name of egalité, but before the Revolutionary Tribunal, there was no more equality before the law than anywhere else. By the end, the revolutionaries had whittled down the legal niceties to the bare minimum: when Robespierre fell, he was merely declared an outlaw and promptly executed without even a show trial. Hardman concludes: “The tragedy of the French Revolution is that the rule of lawyers failed to bring about the rule of law.”

John Hardman’s elegant, erudite and evocative French Revolution: A Political History explains how the France we know emerged from the grand guignol of the guillotine.

If the Revolution failed to establish the rule of law, what about the citizens’ promised liberty? The “sea-green incorruptible”—as Carlyle dubbed Robespierre on account of his zealous reputation and ghastly complexion—had no more compassion for his comrades than for his enemies. “Whoever trembles is guilty,” he told the Convention in order to silence a speaker defending his friend and rival Danton. Imprisoned alongside Thomas Paine, Danton told him (he spoke better English than Paine did French): “I tried in vain to do what you did for the liberty and happiness of your people [i.e. the Americans].” In reality, the Revolution was a disaster for both liberty and happiness. The France of the Enlightenment, which had sown the seeds of freedom, was brought to an untimely end. What emerged instead was a police state, which continued to extend its powers even under the successors of Robespierre: the “men of Thermidor,” the Directory, and Bonaparte.

No figure comes better out of Hardman’s pages than Danton, the only one of the leading revolutionaries who displayed genuine moral courage and political sense. But he was under no illusions about the havoc he and his fellow Jacobins had wrought. “I am leaving things in a terrible mess. No one understands the art of government,” he lamented on the eve of his death. “Things might stagger on for a bit if I left my balls to Robespierre.” The man who eventually inherited the mantle of virility was, of course, Napoleon.

Nearly two and a half centuries after the French Revolution, it is high time to consider just how radical the transformation it wrought was. Hardman focuses on its impact on France rather than on Europe and beyond. Boldly, he makes use of counterfactuals to explain how events might easily have taken a different turn. As the author of a definitive biography of Louis XVI, he explains both why the monarch and his consort made their key decisions, such as fleeing Paris in 1791, and how they might have avoided not only their own dismal fate but that of France. Hardman even proposes a speech that the depressive and taciturn king might have given to the Convention in 1793 if he had not, as so often, taken refuge in silence.

Whatever his other faults, Louis was not vindictive: he accepted that “one can never govern a people against its inclinations” and begged his son not to avenge his death. Despite the old adage that the Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, after the restoration in 1814, the regicides were not executed (as they had been in England in 1660) but merely banished.

In his conclusion, Hardman agrees with Boissy d’Anglas, one of the presidents of the Convention, that France consumed six centuries in six years. If the deputies gathering in 1789 had been transported in time back to the fourteenth century, they would have found the governing institutions familiar enough. But if they had travelled forward just seventy years, “they would have found themselves in an unknown land.” As Tocqueville observed in his great work L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution française, published in 1856, “the radical Revolution … has obscured everything which it has not destroyed”.

This unrecognisable post-revolutionary France was ruled not by a Bourbon but a Bonaparte, Napoleon III. It was, however, dominated not by the emperor but by a new ruling class, immortalised by the rising artists of the Impressionist movement. As Louis had foreseen, by uniting the old rights of birth and status with the newer ones of property and wealth, the upper bourgeoisie and the nobility had become the “notables.” Richer, better educated, and more numerous than the aristocracy of the ancien régime, they would survive every vicissitude. For better or worse, these notables, the bastard offspring of the Revolution, are still running the country today. John Hardman’s elegant, erudite, and evocative French Revolution: A Political History explains how the France we know emerged from the grand guignol of the guillotine.

Angela Franks’s Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self illuminates how our culture came to be unrecognizable to so many. As she tells it, the changes came about gradually and then all at once. It is a careful and vast intellectual history, engaging notable thinkers like Aristotle, Augustine, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also novelists like Jane Austen and C. S. Lewis, to explain the observable contemporary incoherence surrounding the self, the body, and identity. That incoherence, Franks demonstrates, is a primary cause of our current malaise. This deeply considered work is a welcome contribution to the present literature on the body, gender ideology, and the self. 

The most provocative aspect of the book is the contention that Christianity, even though it posits a natural moral order, had a seminal role in destabilizing identity by making it less socially embedded. Obedience to Christ and Christianity’s universality transcend loyalty to family or tribe, which were traditional and solid sources of identity. Christians also affirmed from the beginning that both men and women could have individual callings commensurate with their talents, which could likewise clash against unchosen and more collective loyalties. That belief introduces more potential challenges to traditional sources of identity. 

As Christianity supports a (properly understood) form of individualism and vocation, readers are called to consider what kind, and degree, of solidity and liquidity is just and good for human beings. To what extent did Christianity, either purposefully or inadvertently, contribute to the modern identity crisis? And how does its answer to that crisis speak to our contemporary social discontent? 

Liquid Bodies, Empty Selves

Franks begins her investigation by examining the confusion over the body and identity that permeates our modern world. She contends that modern society has become characterized by “liquid bodies and empty selves.” For much of human history, people operated in a predominantly solid and unchosen world, born into given familial, national, and class structures. Those structures are now more fluid, as relationships are less permanent, roles less defined, and an understanding of an immutable human nature, and an orientation toward the good, undermined. Instead of drawing on unchosen ties to answer the question, “Who am I?” (a member of a family, class, nation, and such), individuals must now answer that question for themselves. As Franks summarizes, “In modernity, we are given no assistance with this task: not from an idea of ‘human nature,’ which has been deconstructed; not from social roles, which have been liquified; and not from moral codes, which have been relativized.”

Amidst the Rousseauian demand for authenticity, and absent an understanding of the human person, what comes to matter most is choice, rather than the moral content of that choice. Modern self-definition is not about inculcating virtue but about curating or purchasing an outward appearance, as exemplified by consumerism and carefully cultivated social media profiles often distant from reality. Such themes are apparent and explored in Western literature. Jane Austen deftly demonstrates, particularly through Mansfield Park, the distinction between appearance and reality, with charm functioning as the doxic (Franks’s chosen formulation) self and virtue the true core. Overall, people have more freedom to form their lives and identities, which has benefits. 

Yet it also turns out that too much choice, absent a telos, is debilitating, that defining every aspect of oneself is an anxious endeavor and a burden too immense for mortal man. The modern individual is narcissistic and liberated, able to determine truths about his nature and identity, yet empty because he doesn’t know who he is. 

Just as previous eras arguably erred on the side of excessive rigidity in social and human structures, so our age errs on the side of excessive fluidity.

Further, contemporary culture simultaneously elevates and denigrates the body, sometimes dismissing it but also asking too much of it; “sexuality bears a disproportionate weight when it comes to contemporary identity-formulation.” With postmodernism, the body has been liquified by separating desire from purpose, as “meaningful desire would require commitment and self-sacrifice in pursuit of a goal somehow bigger than ourselves.” 

Ultimately, for Franks, Pope John-Paul II’s formulation that the body reveals the person is preeminent. Bodies both express, and are inseparable from, the individual, which means that questions about identity and the body are interrelated. 

Provocations

Franks’s book is primarily an intellectual history meant to explain the ideas behind these observable modern realities. What is rather unexpected is her demonstration that Christianity first introduced certain complications with identity. 

Ancient identity was solid, as human beings were born into rigid, tethered, and unchosen hierarchies and institutions. Even gods were gods of the city. The ancients were interested in the self, and able to think about body and soul in complex ways, with Aristotle in particular providing a substantive metaphysical account of identity by weaving together the soul and the body. Those philosophical explanations were explored, however, in a society in which most people already had a reasonably firm understanding of where they fit into the fabric of human life and society.

A universal Christianity undermines solidity somewhat by putting obedience to Christ above even family loyalty or membership in a particular tribe or nation. Further, the calling of a Christian and God’s love for a person are individual. For example, the apostle Paul had a vocation that was distinct. This introduces choice or liquidity. 

However, a vocation is still given and grounded. “Paul knows who he is, his true self, because he has received that identity from Christ.” Likewise, Augustine’s ultimate answer to the content of the self is to acknowledge that we are all made in the image of God and receive, rather than create, our identity. Christianity left in place an immutable understanding of human nature and a moral order rooted in the transcendent, even as it prompted theologians and philosophers to consider more carefully the nature of the human person. 

As Franks details, the modern notion of identity really takes hold with the rise of secularism: “The loss of a widespread sense of transcendent divinity shifted our relationship to our selves from one of reception to construction: from the instinct that identity is found in what and who we were made to be by forces beyond us, to the conviction that the self has to be formed from the outside in.” 

Though her book is not about solutions, as that will be dealt with in a second volume, Franks’s analysis points to Christianity’s resolution of the problem it contributes to: that the identity of the Christian will find rest in God’s plan for each person. Ironically, for Franks, Christianity both begins the problem and offers the remedy. 

The contention that Christianity first liquified identity is provocative in the best sense. The need for cultural recalibration is obvious, but Franks is careful to reject a reactive approach. In our current climate, pervaded with customizable lives and in need of duties, conservatives can perhaps be inclined to dichotomize rigidity and liquidity, with the former being wholly beneficial and the latter detrimental. Franks’s analysis prompts necessary pause:

Rather than seeing these vectors as characterizing the reality of man who consists of a coming-from and going-toward a transcendent origin and goal (chapter 7), contemporary theory loads all this fluidity onto the body while immanentizing and liquifying human nature. Just as previous eras arguably erred on the side of excessive rigidity in social and human structures, so our age errs on the side of excessive fluidity. But both stability and fluidity are marks of the human person. They must, however, be properly understood. 

Human beings have obligations to family and nation that are invaluable sources of purpose. People are also individuals with equal dignity, loved personally, and bequeathed particular callings commensurate with our talents. We cannot dismiss either of those aspects of Christianity (or the American experiment). Identifying the proper balance between liquidity and solidity is even more urgent as we debate the contours and validity of liberalism and individualism (whatever those terms mean anymore). If the identity crisis came about through a breakdown of an agreement regarding human nature, social roles, and moral codes, recovering an understanding of the human person, natural law, and stabilizing institutions would go a long way in correcting our current predicament. 

Franks’s discussion of the empty self, Christopher Lasch, and Betty Friedan helps readers further explore aspects of identity and vocation. Lasch observed the rise of a self-centered, or softly narcissistic, culture obsessed with appearances. However, as Franks notes:

Friedan does not get much credit for noticing the widespread existence of a culture of narcissism sixteen years before Lasch did. Lasch argued that most people were on the narcissistic spectrum and tended to lack a sense of self. When Friedan blamed “the feminine mystique” for women’s lack of “a sense of human identity, the firm core of self or ‘I’” she was noticing the same kind of thing. 

Lasch himself agreed with this, as he wrote, “In the light of the subsequent radicalization of the women’s movement, The Feminine Mystique is usually read (when it is read at all) as the first halting step down the road since traveled by an army of more militant women.” In reality, “The issue, in a word, was how to revive a sense of vocation in a society destitute of any sense of common purpose.” 

These tensions and inquiries persist. While vocation and work are not synonymous, and work is not the only form of vocation, there is a substantial overlap between the two. In part, an understanding of vocation was what Friedan was tapping into and why her book resonated in a historically Christian nation, a nation where a man’s reputation would suffer if he buried his talents, or, as Tocqueville wrote, just spent his life living. 

Friedan, though at times insulting, was correct in many of her observations, including those about consumerism and advertising aimed at women, and when people offer pertinent descriptions, we tend to follow them in their solutions. However, she posited an inadequate solution by encouraging women to find their identities solely in paid employment. While there is dignity in work, and vocation is a high good, vocation is grounded in service to others and God, meant to inculcate personal virtue. It is given, and inseparable from human nature and the transcendent. The Feminine Mystique was ultimately unable to “revive a sense of vocation” because Friedan’s analysis was not informed by an understanding of natural law and the human person. Without comprehending the purpose and meaning behind actions, they can become hollow. To reiterate Franks, meaningful desire requires “commitment and self-sacrifice in pursuit of a goal somehow bigger than ourselves.”

Friedan’s housewife is restless and in search of meaning, even with relatively solid social roles in place. This suggests that strict social roles in themselves, absent an understanding of human nature, are inadequate to identity formation. Loading too much of one’s identity onto something, even if it is a good (a career, a relationship), will ultimately be tenuous. Either society was divested of a common purpose, as Lasch suggests, or the suburban middle-class housewife was somewhat detached from contributing to that purpose by being alienated from civil society. Again, Franks’s analysis cautions against reactivity, against putting all our eggs in one identity basket.

Looking Ahead

Franks’s substantive, careful, and expansive book falls into the category of analysis most equipped to explain the modern world we live in: literature that deals with the body, the self, identity, and expressive individualism. 

Like Joshua Mitchell’s American Awakening and Andrew Cherlin’s The Marriage Go-Round, it compels readers to consider how, and to what extent, Christianity, in its pure or distorted form, has contributed to the identity crisis and expressive individualism. While both Cherlin and Franks examine Catholicism and Protestantism, Mitchell sees identity politics as primarily a Protestant devolution; Carl Jung similarly observed that Protestantism tends to degrade in an individualistic direction, while Catholicism withers toward the authoritarian. Such observations raise questions about what kind of recalibrations American society needs, if both Catholicism and Protestantism have helped form the American character. Such recalibrations could come in the form of reform within the churches themselves or by taking advantage of the arguments of theologians as philosophers in the public square. 

To move beyond our current predicament, American society will need to offer people more helpful touchpoints that can enable them to figure out who they are, emphasizing the importance of duty and the meaning found in dedication to something higher than themselves as a corrective against the ascendance of liquidity. This could involve finding ways to engage in rooted communities and, as a citizen of a particular country, rather than retreating to an online customizable reality or taking up world travel as a distraction. Ironically, focusing on serving others bolsters our understanding of ourselves.

Still, there is a danger in that recalibration becoming reactive, in dismissing individuality or the individual dignity of the human person that is posited by Christianity and is the bedrock of the American project. The liquid aspect of human beings, Christianity, and liberalism cannot be disregarded without transforming society and going against the dictates of justice. Ultimate solutions are rooted in theology of the body, a proper understanding of vocation, and the transcendent that combine liquidity, obligation and love, and immutability.

In February 2008, a documentary film titled Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family premiered at the Heritage Foundation. Featuring economists and scholars such as Nicholas Eberstadt, Alan Viard, and Kay Hymowitz, a banner declared that the film’s subject matter—the global dearth in children being born—represented “the single most powerful force directing the fate and future of society.” 

At the onset of the Great Recession, the topic of low fertility rates attracted little interest from journalists, policymakers, or the public at large. A scathing review of the documentary in Harvard Divinity Bulletin lambasted an “insidious undercurrent” that ostensibly dog-whistled a nefarious agenda of the religious right. 

But 17 years later, Demographic Winter proved to be remarkably ahead of its time. As two-thirds of people now live in countries with sub-replacement fertility rates and economies undergo “Japanification,” with more retirees than workers, the baby bust is no longer considered a partisan or marginal issue. 

Headlines about the challenges of aging and shrinking populations now abound across the mainstream media, and a series of acclaimed books by decidedly non-conservative authors recently hit shelves, including Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019) and Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan’s The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival (2020). 

The latest such book, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People (2025), co-authored by economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, repudiates the longstanding myth that the world is overpopulated, which still lingers in popular culture and public opinion. In a straightforward and cogent manner, Spears and Geruso demonstrate that people are a net good—for innovation, for rising living standards, and yes, even for the planet. 

Spears and Geruso provide a thorough rebuttal to the claim that people are having fewer children because of a lack of affordability, highlighting the role of opportunity costs in shaping fertility decisions, at least in rich countries.

But with fertility rates on the wane globally, After the Spike also presents a comprehensive analysis of the causes and consequences of depopulation and a compelling call to action. Even Princeton professor emeritus Peter Singer, who has long pushed the overpopulation argument, endorsed the book and said it challenged and changed his thinking about population. 

Echoing the economic insight of Julian Simon, the co-authors note that “a good idea does not get used up.” The world is not a fixed pie, and population growth contributes to an increase in “non-rival innovation,” which benefits everyone through greater technological progress. One person’s good idea “gets copied and reapplied, endlessly.” The results of the famous wager between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich have demonstrated that we aren’t going to run out of resources and starve to death in a Malthusian catastrophe. As Simon correctly predicted in his 1981 book The Ultimate Resource, a rising number of “skilled, spirited, and hopeful” people results in more ingenuity, abundance, and lower prices over time.

In the years 1990–2019, global food production surged by 61 percent as the world population increased by 45 percent. In that same period, global extreme poverty fell from over one-third to less than 10 percent, and the prices of commodities became much cheaper, as Simon anticipated. Apart from wars or government mismanagement, famines have virtually disappeared. 

Despite these vast improvements in material well-being, many are still gravely worried about climate change and the impact of 8.2 billion people on the earth’s ecosystems. Spears and Geruso take the threat of global warming seriously, but they also showcase how depopulation is not a path to decarbonization. Nor is there a theoretical or historical relationship between population size and particulate air pollution. Whether the population stabilizes or declines, the global temperature is still forecast to rise. “Billions of lives lived would make a small difference to this big problem,” they said. 

The solution, then, requires more brains, not fewer. Our “strength is in our numbers, not just our rare luminaries.” Low fertility rates means fewer creative and scientific geniuses will be born to meet the immense challenges of the twenty-first century. As the co-authors warn, “There is no clean energy future, no answer to carbon emissions, without technological progress.”

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have created a freer, healthier, and more prosperous world where more people can live good, happy lives. Yet these improvements have ironically led to a state of affairs in which people want to bring fewer children into an objectively better world. 

Why? Most insightfully, Spears and Geruso provide a thorough rebuttal to the claim that people are having fewer children because of a lack of affordability, highlighting the role of opportunity costs in shaping fertility decisions, at least in rich countries. Fertility preference surveys, which ask respondents their “ideal fertility,” may find that people cite financial limitations as a main reason they’re having fewer children, but these surveys don’t reveal the fuller picture. They don’t ask people what they’re willing to give up to achieve their “ideal fertility.”

“Once we understand ‘too expensive’ to be about opportunity cost (rather than only money cost), we can see that there are ways that children have become more costly, if not exactly less affordable,” Spears and Geruso said. “Parenting a child, or another child, could mean scaling back educational goals, career plans, or other ambitions.” One study, cited in the book, shows no correlation in the United States between cost-of-living increases and reduced child-bearing since the Great Recession. Fertility rates dwindled in every state, yet they did not fall faster or more significantly in states where prices went up the most, as the affordability hypothesis would claim. 

Government intervention via pro-natal policies or even free in-vitro fertilization (IVF) won’t meaningfully change these fertility patterns since people will only have as many children as they desire.

Spears and Geruso acknowledge that they don’t have an answer to the ultimate question that now puzzles demographers and economists: Why is fertility declining everywhere, in rich and poor countries alike? 

Contrary to the Demographic Transition Model, which posits that child-bearing plummets with rising affluence and women’s empowerment, the co-authors point out that there are exceptions to every theory of declining fertility. For example, India is a sub-replacement society, yet Indian women marry young and enjoy fewer freedoms than their Western counterparts. Sub-replacement fertility is also occurring in Myanmar, Nepal, and Bangladesh, which are designated by the United Nations as least developed countries (LDCs). 

Government intervention via pro-natal policies or even free in-vitro fertilization (IVF) won’t meaningfully change these fertility patterns since people will only have as many children as they desire. And the reality of the twenty-first century is that people worldwide want fewer children. A 2025 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)/YouGov survey found that the most common number of children people around the world want is two. 

The economics profession has not yet provided a definitive explanation as to why people almost everywhere desire, and are having, fewer children. As Nicholas Eberstadt said, “The genius who finally answers that question will deserve a Nobel, but I think it’ll be a Nobel in literature and not in economics. He or she will have to channel the global zeitgeist, chart the shifting coastlines of the modern mentality, and explore the secrets hidden in billions of human hearts.”

Overpopulation anxieties are still widespread globally, with nearly half of Americans believing that the world’s population is too high, according to a 2022 YouGov poll. But if Spears and Geruso were able to change Peter Singer’s mind, perhaps they can achieve the same effect among a much wider audience. 

After the Spike doesn’t have a solution to the coming global depopulation, nor does it claim to. It is a call for decision-makers and the public to begin preparing for a future with fewer humans, which is inevitably and steadfastly approaching. For up-and-coming scholars, journalists, and policymakers in Gen Z, this book outlines the dilemmas and discussions that will become increasingly pressing as they assume leadership roles in society. It is therefore an essential read for the younger demographic, which may inherit and grow old in a world “after the spike.” 

As America teeters on the brink of its 250th anniversary as a sovereign republic in 2026, a fog of uncertainty shrouds the true meaning of freedom, rights too often reduced to slogans amid partisan strife. Counterintuitively, the surest path to clarity lies not in our revolutionary origins but in peering back at our mother country’s ancient constitutional tapestry. There, the British constitutional historian David Starkey emerges as a Virgil-like sage, charting England’s republican-monarchical tradition. As we approach the anniversary of our independence, it is worth revisiting his analysis of how the English “crowned republic”—a monarchy tempered by communal consent—seeded American ideals of limited government, sidestepping the Puritan radicals’ chaotic bid to dismantle the throne altogether.

Starkey is widely celebrated for his penetrating studies of English political development and its enduring institutional legacy. Best known for works such as Magna Carta: The True Story Behind the Charter, Crown and Country, and The Monarchy of England, Starkey combines archival depth with a keen ability to connect historical evolution to modern governance. He presents the English constitutional order as a living organism—shaped not by abstract theory but by centuries of pragmatic adaptation, legal precedent, and civic habit.

The English Constitution, often praised for its continuity and resilience, represents for Starkey a historical evolution rather than a philosophical creation. He offers a trenchant critique of rights-based and universalist narratives of liberty, arguing that England’s constitutional character and its profound influence on the American founding emerged from tradition rather than theory. The liberties embodied in representative assemblies, trial by jury, and the balance of powers, he contends, were not Enlightenment inventions but refinements of England’s deep-rooted constitutional inheritance. For American readers, Starkey’s work serves as a reminder that the republic they built, though revolutionary in form, was grounded in the slow, empirical wisdom of the English political tradition.

For Starkey, the liberties embedded within English law and political practice did not emerge from revolutionary theory but from centuries of habitual negotiation, practical governance, and the incremental development of institutions. To understand this perspective, one must trace the evolution of the English Constitution, examine Starkey’s critique of Hobbesian and Lockean abstractions, and situate the American Founders’ adoption of English republican practices alongside the selective influence of Montesquieu.

David Starkey argues that the English republican tradition originally arose from a monarchial one, where a “crowned republic” blended regal symbolism with republican limits. This view of this blended monarchial tradition arises from three medieval pillars: John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1159), Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae (c. 1470), and Magna Carta (1215). Salisbury’s “body politic” metaphor portrays the king as the head accountable to law and realm, thereby distinguishing England’s dominium politicum et regale, a hybrid rule under custom and counsel, from France’s absolute dominium regale. Fortescue elaborates on this in praising England’s co-created laws and parliamentary consent, which bars tyranny through shared sovereignty. Magna Carta enacts these ideals, enforcing due process and prohibiting taxation without consent, thereby transforming the feudal pact into a constitutional restraint. Together, Starkey contends, they forge a kingship conditional on the common good, evolving through communal oversight to ensure monarchical stability.

Starkey asserts that the American Founding drew directly from English inheritance.

Starkey situates the origins of English liberty in lived historical experience. From Magna Carta to the post-Glorious Revolution settlement (1688), English governance evolved through continuity, negotiation, and local autonomy. Key elements, such as due process, trial by jury, representative assemblies, and an uncodified but flexible constitution, arose organically from custom, habit, and precedent. This gradual evolution fostered a political culture deeply habituated to compromise and incremental adaptation. For instance, the reassertion of parliamentary power after the Civil Wars and Restoration was the product of centuries-long negotiation among monarch, lords, and commons, not abstract theory. Power in England, Starkey contends, has always been practical and dispersed, a republicanism embedded in institutional memory and pragmatic engagement.

By contrast, Starkey critiques the rights-based frameworks of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes’ Leviathan imposed a rigid social contract, while Locke’s natural rights (such as life, liberty, and property) claimed universality. Both, Starkey argues, are dangerously abstract, ignoring historical specificity, privileging individual claims over collective stability, and justifying interventions that destabilize societies. Modern examples, from US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan to domestic polarization over abortion and other rights, illustrate these risks. The English Constitution, instead, embeds liberty in practices, procedures, and institutions, emphasizing continuity and adaptability over theoretical universality.

Starkey further asserts that the American Founding drew directly from this English inheritance. The Framers were “already free,” inheriting English law and colonial self-governance. They mirrored English institutions: the presidency echoes George III’s executive role, the Senate resembles the House of Lords, and the House of Representatives parallels the Commons. Even procedural offices, from the Speaker to the Sergeant at Arms, reflect the continuity of parliamentary tradition. Federalism addressed the practical challenge of a continent-spanning republic, yet the core republican structure—habits, customs, and embedded liberties—remained unmistakably English. By transplanting practical governance rather than philosophical abstractions, the Framers ensured the endurance and adaptability of American self-government, unlike revolutions lacking historical grounding, such as the French Revolution, which often descended into instability and violence.

To fully appreciate Starkey’s historiographical project, it is instructive to juxtapose his argument with the influence of Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws (1748) profoundly shaped the thinking of the American Founders. Analyzing post-Glorious Revolution England, the Frenchman argued for the separation of powers into legislative, executive, and judicial branches as essential to preserving liberty and preventing tyranny. His approach was systematic and universalizing, offering a theoretical framework to codify what he saw as England’s practical success. James Madison, in Federalist #47, explicitly cited Montesquieu to defend the tripartite system, while other Framers, including Alexander Hamilton, used his ideas to justify checks and balances. Montesquieu’s influence was transformative in the sense that it provided a coherent, analytical template for embedding checks into the new US Constitution, ensuring that ambition would counter ambition and no branch could dominate unchecked.

Yet Starkey remains skeptical of this intellectual genealogy. He portrays Montesquieu as a secondary actor at best, whose praise of England’s liberties abstracts and simplifies a complex historical reality. In Starkey’s view, the separation-of-powers model risks over-formalizing the English experience, imposing rigid divisions where practical governance relied on flexible, habitual negotiation. Montesquieu’s theoretical lens, Starkey contends, can lead to gridlock and institutional friction, whereas England’s uncodified constitution demonstrates that liberty evolves from cultural practice rather than universal prescription. The American Founders, steeped in English legal and political habits, selectively adopted Montesquieu’s ideas not as foundational principles but as convenient rationalizations for a codified structure that nonetheless retained the DNA of English republicanism.

The tension between inherited political practice and abstract principle lies at the heart of modern constitutionalism, distinguishing the perspectives of David Starkey and Montesquieu. For Starkey, political order emerges from lived tradition, not universal theory. England’s constitution evolved over centuries through practical adjustment, from medieval precedents to the post-1688 settlement, rather than from any formal doctrine of separated powers. To him, the “separation of powers” is a “tawdry French import,” imposed by pamphleteers like Bolingbroke and later misapplied by theorists. England’s stability rested on the subtle interdependence of Crown, Lords, and Commons; attempts to impose Montesquieu’s rigid logic disrupted this organic equilibrium.

Montesquieu, in contrast, transformed England’s experience into a universal principle. In The Spirit of the Laws, he recast its mixed constitution as a model of institutional checks and balances, channeling ambition into restraint. The American Founders embraced this analysis, codifying separation of powers in Articles I–III to institutionalize the English genius for balance within a republican framework. What Starkey sees as a misreading, the Founders saw as deliberate design.

Starkey emphasizes inherited habits as the source of enduring liberty: jury trials, representative assemblies, and the rule of law flourish through continuity and moral-cultural practice. Montesquieu’s influence, however, encouraged the Founders to universalize those habits into theory. America’s political order, then, stands between these poles: practical English inheritance transformed into conscious constitutional design. Today, the tension persists: Starkey warns that abstraction breeds instability, while Montesquieu asserts that liberty relies on structure and balanced ambition. Modern constitutionalism continues to navigate this interplay between history and principle.

The contrast between Starkey’s empiricism and Enlightenment abstraction also illuminates broader historiographical debates about the nature of political liberty. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu valorized universal principles, Starkey champions historically situated pragmatism. The English experience demonstrates that liberty is not a fixed entitlement derived from abstract reasoning, but a mutable, negotiated practice that emerges from centuries of incremental adaptation. Trial by jury, representative assemblies, and parliamentary oversight did not appear as abstract rights; they were cultivated through habit, conflict, and compromise, allowing English society to absorb shocks such as civil war and revolutionary upheaval without losing continuity. In this light, the American Founders’ success lies in their transplantation of an organic constitutional culture rather than the mechanical application of universal principles.

Liberty emerges through continuity, negotiation, and institutional memory—cultivated over generations, not merely proclaimed in theory.

Starkey’s perspective also challenges the teleological view of history that casts the US Constitution as a triumph of Enlightenment rationalism. By foregrounding English legal and political inheritance, he reframes the American Founding as less a revolutionary rupture than a careful reworking of inherited norms. Federalism, codified checks and balances, and written procedural rules were innovations that brought scale and clarity, rather than foundational departures from English tradition. The US Constitution, then, is best understood not as a theoretical blueprint for liberty but as the institutional crystallization of practical English habits adapted to an expansive and diverse polity.

Starkey’s critique extends beyond historical analysis into contemporary political debate, warning against the risks of imposing abstract, universalist rights without regard for cultural and institutional realities. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, alongside persistent domestic polarization over constitutional interpretation and rights claims, underscore the enduring relevance of his argument. Societies that transplant universalist doctrines without the scaffolding of historical habit and institutional memory are prone to instability, a problem England largely avoided through centuries of incremental evolution.

David Starkey’s historiography offers a compelling reinterpretation of the English Constitution’s contribution to political liberty and its influence on the American founding. By privileging organic, historically grounded traditions over abstract philosophical reasoning, he reframes debates over rights, liberty, and republican government. In his view, the American Constitution represents an adaptation of centuries of English self-governance rather than a radical invention based on universal abstractions. While Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu provided analytical frameworks that shaped the formal architecture of the state, their influence remained subordinate to the practical inheritance of English habits and institutions. Liberty, in this view, emerges through continuity, negotiation, and institutional memory—cultivated over generations, not merely proclaimed in theory.

Starkey’s argument resonates closely with the work of conservative scholars of the American founding. Like Russell Kirk in The Roots of the American Order, he emphasizes the inheritance of moral and institutional traditions, showing that liberty is nurtured through habits and prudential negotiation rather than imposed by abstract principles. Forrest McDonald in Novus Ordo Seclorum similarly highlights the historically grounded, practical nature of the US Constitution, portraying the Framers as skilled practitioners of English institutional models rather than idealists of universal rights. M. E. Bradford in Original Intentions aligns with this view, underscoring the Framers’ commitment to continuity, incremental adaptation, and procedural safeguards derived from English law. Across all three accounts, there is a shared skepticism toward abstract rights: stable governance emerges from historically rooted practices, institutional memory, and a careful calibration of power among competing actors. Starkey, therefore, can be situated within this intellectual tradition, demonstrating that the endurance of Anglo-American political order rests on prudence, precedent, and the cultivation of civic habits.

When Caryn Elaine Johnson—the daughter of a Baptist clergyman with no Jewish background and better known by the stage name “Whoopi Goldberg”—declared on The View that the Holocaust “isn’t about race,” she was immediately and rightly rebuked. Nazi ideology treated Jews as a race, and the Nuremberg Laws codified that racial definition into persecution and extermination. To deny this is to deny history.

Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was correct when he appeared on the next episode of the TV show and explained that her evaluation of the Holocaust as merely “man’s inhumanity to man” was inadequate. However, this piece of wisdom was a departure from ADL’s own position. After all, the organization itself used to define racism as: “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of colour based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” The Jewish Policy Center was right to call this “completely unacceptable.” By its definition, a billion Han Chinese cannot be racist toward Koreans or Mongolians, nor can Japanese be racist toward black people—because racism, according to the ADL, is something only white people can enact. By its own definition, the ADL should have defended Goldberg’s mistake—which only underscores how unworkable that definition is.

The problem is larger than this definition. The ADL has also been criticized for transforming from a watchdog of extremism into a partisan actor, reshaping civic education in the image of progressive ideology. Through its “No Place for Hate” initiative, the organization promoted school curricula emphasizing systemic racism, white privilege, and reparations—concepts far afield from its original mission of combating Jew-hatred. Jonathan S. Tobin, editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, even spoke about a “betrayal of the organization’s responsibilities.” This is important because what comes with this shift is a downplay of left-wing antisemitism in academia, popular culture, and the left-wing of the Democratic Party. The ADL, for instance, defended two antisemitic members of Congress “largely on the basis that they were ‘women of color.’”

Some scholars of antisemitism fall into a similar ideological trap of viewing antisemitism through a CRT lens. In doing so, they miss what is distinctive about antisemitism itself and, worse, allow antisemitic tropes to slip into the conversation under the guise of scholarship.

In a way, Antisemitism and the Law is not just the perfect example for this trend but also an excellent title for a book surrounded by exactly that: antisemitism and the law. Robert Katz’s volume seeks to offer a “comprehensive examination” of how courts and legislatures have grappled with Jewish identity, antisemitism, and related questions of speech, crime, and advocacy. The book aims to equip students and practitioners with both historical perspective and strategic tools for combating Jew-hatred. Backed by major ADL funding and promoted for adoption in law schools, it presents itself as both scholarship and handbook. Yet the world from which it emerges suggests that the book may embody more of the problem than a solution.

Katz himself is professor of law at Indiana University and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Antisemitism—an independent non-profit. He is also the co-organizer of the controversial “Law vs. Antisemitism” conferences, which are “inspired by the history of Critical Race Theory.” The other co-founder, Diane Kemker, identifies herself as a “Critical Race Theory person” and speaks in her ahistorical work about a “Jewish benefit from white supremacy and white privilege” and a “Jewish complicity with anti-Black racism.” The inaugural address at the first conference was delivered by a Harvard professor, a non-legal scholar, who argued in his work that Zionism was a means for its founder to “expose his genitals.” The claim recalls that famous line, often misattributed to Orwell: “That’s an idea so stupid only an intellectual could believe it.” In a later book, the Harvard professor then declared that “Jewish culture was steeped in fantasies (and occasionally, acts) of vengeance against Christians” and that “veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization.” As I argued in a piece for the Martin Center, these events don’t expose antisemitism; antisemitism exposes them—revealing the intellectual bankruptcy behind much of this scholarship. Yet they have drawn significant attendance, including figures such as Kenneth L. Marcus, former assistant secretary for civil rights under the first Trump administration, who later contributed to Antisemitism and the Law.

The problems of intellectual clarity visible at these conferences reappear in the book itself, whose structure creates confusion: Katz is listed as the book’s author while he is in fact the editor and main contributor of the volume. Much of the volume consists of Katz’s own essays, interspersed with other scholars’ conference papers and podcast transcripts, giving the impression of scholarship where much is commentary. Moreover, the front-matter “contributors” list fails to correspond consistently with the table of contents or the actual authorship of chapters. The result is a disorienting situation: contributors are sometimes not authors, and authors are not properly introduced, eroding clarity and accountability.

While these scholars treat race as the most important element in discussing antisemitism and Jewish life, they miss what matters and allow antisemitism itself to slip in.

One actual contributor, David Schraub, epitomizes the volume’s flaws. At a “Law vs. Antisemitism” conference, he advanced the dangerous claim that white Jews are “directly implicated in and often beneficiaries of our racist systems [in America],” and in some cases even “helped propagate White privilege.” By suggesting that Jews, as a monolithic group, are complicit in systemic injustice, Schraub echoes Kemker’s rhetoric, reminiscent of antisemitic tropes. His arguments also stand in sharp contrast to the history of the Civil Rights movement in America, which saw exceptionally strong Jewish involvement. In Antisemitism and the Law, Schraub now speculates about when “whiteness” confers or deprives Jews of power and privilege. Presented as legal analysis, his contribution reads less as law and more as ideological assertion, illustrating the volume’s tendency to conflate commentary with scholarship.

Schraub’s essay is not an outlier. The book as a whole displays a pronounced preoccupation with race, as in Marcus’s essay “The Jewish Racial Question”: “The question of Jewish racial construction may appear obvious to those who observe that many American Jews appear White, are perceived as White, and experience themselves as White.” The implication is that Jews therefore do not face the disadvantages endured by people of color in America. Yet why should this be the measure in a book devoted to antisemitism? To frame Jewish experience as if it were in competition with that of black Americans is to misunderstand the inquiry.

By narrowing antisemitism into a discussion around race and privilege, the volume sidesteps the urgent question of how the law responds to antisemitic violence in practice. Antisemitism and the Law bills itself as a “comprehensive examination.” Yet it remains silent on one of the most crucial topics: the intersection of antisemitism and psychological assessment in criminal law—a recurring issue in which courts at times treat antisemitic violence as the product of mental illness rather than moral agency. This omission is not abstract; it directly affects mens rea determinations, competency evaluations, and sentencing mitigation when antisemitic violence is reframed as madness rather than moral choice. This tendency has surfaced in several rulings, most notoriously in the case of Sarah Halimi.

Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman and retired kindergarten teacher, was tortured and murdered in her Paris apartment in 2017. Her attacker chanted verses from the Koran, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and antisemitic slurs, and then threw her still-living body out of a third-story window. Judges later declared him not criminally responsible under Article 122 of the French Penal Code. Independent psychiatric experts testified that he was undergoing a “psychotic episode” brought on by cannabis consumption, even while acknowledging that his motivation for killing was the fact that Halimi was Jewish. “The crime was the crime of a madman,” five psychiatrists wrote in Le Monde. “And in France we do not judge the mad.”

To treat antisemitic murder as merely the product of psychosis is to erase moral choice and collapse human action into pathology, as though life were one huge Stanford prison experiment. A book that aspires to be an exhaustive examination of antisemitism and the law should not ignore so vital a problem. The omission is telling: by dwelling on abstract racial categories, Katz and his contributors neglect the very cases where antisemitism and the law collide most urgently. While these scholars treat race as the most important element in discussing antisemitism and Jewish life—obsessing whether Jews are white, non-white, off-white, or ethnic—they miss what matters and allow antisemitism itself to slip in.

To misunderstand this is not a harmless mistake; it has consequences for how courts, legislatures, and civic institutions respond to the hatred. The impulse behind Antisemitism and the Law is right and even necessary. We do need a serious reckoning with how the law can confront antisemitism, and universities could use a handbook worthy of that task. But good intentions do not excuse poor reasoning. In my estimation, Antisemitism and the Law is best understood as a case study in what has often gone wrong within the modern academy: the substitution of ideology for scholarship, the evasion of crucial issues, and the astonishing willingness to let antisemitism creep in under the very pretext of combating it. The stakes are not academic alone. A jurisprudence that defines antisemitism in terms of “whiteness” and “privilege” trains students to confuse ideology with law and to mistake structural jargon for human responsibility. If left unchallenged, such teaching will erode both legal clarity and civic trust. If this is what now passes for a “comprehensive examination,” the danger is not only that students will be misled about antisemitism, but that they will be trained in a jurisprudence that no longer distinguishes between law and its negation. And they forget that while Jews can be victims of racism they should not be defined by race; no one should.

Javier Milei’s commitment to libertarian principles has never been in serious doubt. His ideological lineage traces back to the classical liberal tradition that prizes individual liberty, fiscal discipline, and monetary soundness. The Argentine president’s rhetoric and early policy decisions reflect a clear effort to reverse the decades of economic decay wrought by statist, interventionist governments. If Milei has not yet implemented the “endogenous dollarization”—that is, allowing people to choose whatever currency they prefer by giving legal tender status to foreign currencies that he championed during his campaign—it is not for lack of conviction but because the economic and political conditions necessary for such a transformation are not yet in place.

Dollarization, though appealing as a swift cure to chronic inflation and monetary disorder, cannot by itself resolve the deep-seated structural rigidities in Argentina’s public finances. The national and provincial governments remain burdened by expenditures that are politically entrenched and institutionally rigid. Cutting those expenditures requires not only technical efficiency but also a durable political coalition capable of sustaining reform. At present, Milei faces a legislature in which his coalition lacks the minimum votes to uphold a veto, much less a commanding majority to support his agenda, limiting his capacity to impose far-reaching fiscal restructuring. The gradual pace of reform is therefore less a sign of ideological compromise than a recognition of institutional reality.

Should the Argentine people renew their mandate for Milei’s coalition in the coming election, they will commit themselves to a path of economic recovery—a process that, given the depth of Argentina’s distortions, may well take a generation to bear fruit. If, however, they revert to the populist policies of Peronism, they will condemn themselves to a further cycle of decline. The inflation rate, currently hovering around 30 percent per year, serves as both a symptom and a warning. Despite Milei’s success in restraining spending, the persistence of inflation indicates that not all the channels of monetary financing of public debt have been closed. The fiscal-monetary nexus, in which government deficits are financed by money creation, remains an enduring source of instability despite his obvious successes in reducing the deficit.

Within this context, Milei’s exchange-rate policy deserves careful attention. By allowing the peso to fluctuate within bands that are enlarged 1 percent above and below every month, his government is attempting to steer the market toward an equilibrium—or “indifference”—exchange rate. Before that, Argentina was on a “crawling peg” system, under which Milei’s administration was devaluing the peso by 2 percent per month, at a time when inflation was higher than that. Neither policy brought the peso to a stable exchange rate with the dollar. Markets became nervous as the election approaches, and the Trump administration decided to support the peso with a commitment to purchase the Argentinean currency up to $20 billion. If the experiment succeeds, it may lead to a situation where the peso floats freely without triggering further depreciation, paving the way toward convertibility and ultimately dollarization. In this sense, the current policy can be understood as a preparatory stage for a more durable monetary regime based on market confidence rather than decree.

Argentina’s citizens must decide whether they are willing to endure the short-term hardships required for long-term freedom from inflation and stagnation.

The world’s most resilient currency board—the Hong Kong Monetary Authority—illustrates what such a regime requires. Hong Kong’s system maintains foreign reserves many times larger than its monetary base, ensuring full backing not only for currency issuance but also for potential bank conversions into foreign currency. This immense reserve cushion, combined with the credible political commitment of the Chinese government to support the territory’s financial stability, has preserved the peg even in moments of global turbulence. By contrast, Argentina lacks both the reserves and, until October 20, the external backstop mentioned above that would guarantee a stable conversion rate under a dollarized or currency-board system.

The question then arises whether the United States should view Argentina’s move toward dollarization as strategically desirable. From a geopolitical standpoint, anchoring Argentina to the dollar could deepen hemispheric economic ties and counterbalance Chinese influence in Latin America. Yet from a prudential perspective, it would be premature to fix the Argentine peso irrevocably to the dollar before the country achieves sustained primary fiscal surpluses and a stable political consensus in favor of market reform. To do so would replicate the failed convertibility experiment of the 1990s, when Argentina’s rigid peg collapsed under the weight of fiscal indiscipline and external shocks.

The lesson from that episode—and from similar experiences elsewhere—is that monetary discipline cannot substitute for fiscal responsibility. In Ecuador, for instance, a frequently quoted example of successful dollarization, the process served to reduce the purchasing power of claims against the Ecuadorian government. In Argentina, with its tradition of political representation and protection of entitlements, the experience of the 1990s was one where those commitments could not be diluted without facing insurmountable resistance. True stability requires that the government live within its means, at every level, and that the electorate understand and accept the costs of adjustment. Dollarization imposed before those preconditions are met would transform a policy instrument into a straitjacket, forcing adjustment through painful contraction when shocks inevitably occur. To repeat that experiment would risk not merely another devaluation but another crisis of confidence in liberal reform itself.

Argentina’s challenge is thus not primarily technical but moral and political. Its citizens must decide whether they are willing to endure the short-term hardships required for long-term freedom from inflation and stagnation. The British refusal to adopt the euro as currency serves as a useful analogy: the memory of the deflationary agony of the 1920s gold standard, when convertibility was restored prematurely, still shapes British monetary caution. Similarly, the German aversion to inflation remains rooted in the trauma of 1923. Nations, like individuals, are guided by their historical memories. Argentina’s future will depend on whether its people learn from theirs.

If they choose Milei’s path—anchored in fiscal prudence, market openness, and gradual monetary reform—they may in time rebuild the trust and institutional strength needed for true convertibility. If they turn back toward the populist illusion of costless prosperity, they will continue to drift. Endogenous dollarization remains a worthy goal, but it must be earned through the hard discipline of reform. Only then can Argentina reclaim its long-lost economic dignity.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

On September 24-27, Law & Liberty hosted a new program on the conservative intellectual tradition and its understanding of liberty. Participants, along with the Law & Liberty editorial team and discussion leaders Bradley Birzer, Samuel Gregg, and David Corey, read some of the most prominent conservative thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and discussed the relationship between liberty, order, tradition, and law. A highlight of the event was a keynote talk by Professor Corey, which we are pleased to share below:

Earlier this month, I spent five thousand words explaining how the rule of law is much older than the political ideology of liberalism, and why that matters. In On the Law of Speaking Freely, Glasgow University’s John Millar Professor of Public Law, Adam Tomkins, does much the same thing in an opposed direction, and at book length.

That is, Tomkins recounts how freedom of speech was the last significant component of liberal constitutionalism to emerge. It has no ancient or medieval heritage. All the others—the rule of law is only one—have deep historical roots. Democracy? Classical Athens. Parliaments? Medieval England and Poland. Separation of powers? Roman. Representative government with directly elected representatives? Medieval England. The electoral college? Roman. Constitutional monarchy—i.e., the king is also bound by the laws—Medieval England and Scotland. The secret ballot? Roman. I could go on (and Tomkins does).

Freedom of speech, by contrast, only got out of the starting gate in Early Modern England, and took a couple of centuries to assume a form familiar to modern eyes. “Free speech is not an abstract principle that landed from nowhere,” Tomkins observes. “It had to be fought for—argued for.” One of the reasons the idea can look unfamiliar is because it emerged in temporally distinct stages—the “age of heresy,” the “age of sedition,” and the “age of offence”—and in response to historically contingent behaviours.

In The Law of Speaking Freely—a valuable account of the emergence of and global arguments around free expression—Tomkins does two things. First, he takes great care to put paid to the notion that ideas appear fully formed in a particular historical period or given civilisation, ready for us to pick up and use shorn of context. This excavation is necessary because it means he can do his second task, which is allowing readers to engage in imaginative entry to various historical periods. He then uses this background to illuminate contemporary speech controversies. Inevitably, his intellectual archaeology reveals the extent to which “simple” problems turn out to be much knottier than they appear. It also confers on readers the rare benefit of understanding historical figures on their own terms.

New forms of communication really do upend the world as it once was, for example. No lesser figures in the pantheon of English literature than Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift were appalled by the avalanche of complete nonsense that emanated from many of their fellow scribblers once printing became widespread in England. Both men advocated for a degree of control not only over speech but the press more widely that modern readers find shocking. Meanwhile, those who compare the Internet generally and social media specifically to the invention and dissemination of the printing press have a point.

While he is careful to note that none of the three “ages” he describes are over—“even now we still live in them”—debates over speech emerged in that order, can be dated precisely, and flowed from the pens of named and known individuals who left extensive public records. This has implications for how speech laws work across the UK, EU, United States, and wider Anglosphere.

Heresy

The first arguments surfaced during the Reformation, in response to claims and counterclaims of religious heresy. The printing press provided rocket fuel: freedom of religious conscience and how to manage it thus represented the first serious conflict over something that, to people now, was recognisably “freedom of speech.” In outlining this history, Tomkins is at pains to observe that it took a long time for people who complained about being persecuted for heresy to stop persecuting people they considered heretics in their turn. “Luther was no proponent of free speech as we would understand it today,” he notes. “He presided over book burnings himself, not least the public burning in Wittenberg of the papal bull by which he had been excommunicated.”

What makes Luther significant—along with the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious dissidents who followed him—is the fact that words and being able to read them were the point of the Reformation. And if you wanted to be able to read certain words—in Luther’s case, the Bible, in German—you needed to be able to procure them.

This issue was temporarily resolved by the development of pre-publication licensing. A feature of the Confessional State—where entire national populations were expected to share their monarch’s religion—meant the print trade became a state-backed monopoly run on a system of permits, much like hunting and shooting in many places now. In England, for example, one had to go cap (or, rather, proposed book) in hand—I promise I’m not making this up—to the Worshipful Company of Stationers and apply for Crown approval. If your book was sanctioned, it was then printed and distributed by, you guessed it, the Worshipful Company of Stationers. Nice work for some, as my father used to say.

With the end of licensing came humanity’s first experience of an absolute avalanche of what we now call fake news.

Two of England’s greatest stylists—one a poet, the other a political theorist—took on the Company of Stationers and the State/Crown that stood behind them. The first of these men, John Milton, lost the argument but in the process produced an attack on licensing—Areopagitica—that is so inspiring and fluently written it can be and often is repurposed as a straight defence of freedom of speech, which is not the same thing. Milton had no problem with post-publication censorship. The second intervention came from none other than John Locke, who did win the argument (with his Letter Concerning Toleration), although, like Milton, his claims involved only pre-publication licensing. Locke also provided some useful economic analysis on the side, observing that the Stationers’ monopoly meant England’s books were printed using non-colourfast inks on cheap paper, and shoddily bound.

Licensing thus passed into history, to be replaced by something more familiar (at least to modern lawyers): the law of copyright. The Stationers’ Charter—which had codified its monopoly on book production—ensured that once a member had asserted ownership of a text or “copy” by having it approved, no other member was entitled to publish it. That is, no one else had the “right to copy” it. This is the origin of the term copyright. However, this right to copy was different from our modern law of copyright. The stationers’ copyright was a protection afforded to a book’s printers. The copyright the Statute of Anne introduced was, by contrast, a right granted to the book’s author and based on legislation. Intellectual property was thus born—fully formed as it were—in 1710.

Sedition

I have written as though the religiously-inflected leadership that licensed books in advance and compiled vast lists of banned materials (think the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum)—policing unlicensed printers with an army of spies and wreckers while they were at it—was somehow separate from the state. This is a modern conceit. Church and state were intertwined over many centuries, and it was often difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. As, however, the state grew mighty relative to religion, whether Protestant or Catholic—an effect of Europe’s emerging technological and economic development—it needed a new tool, one without roots in licensing, to silence its critics. That tool was the law of seditious libel.

Seditious libel—which took powerful form by 1695—was expression that fell short of treason but was nonetheless criminal, despite not being violent. It was an offence to “incite by words or writings disaffection towards the state or constituted authority,” and was directed at protecting the great and good—or at least their reputations. “It is very necessary for every Government,” in Chief Justice Holt’s words, “that the people should have a good opinion of it.”

Seditious libel had roots in the law of defamation, which emerged in two civilisations (Roman and English) as a vehicle for the courts to prevent violent self-help in response to verbal or written reputational slights. To this day, many free speech absolutists object to defamation laws, because they do, in fact, curtail speech. This is why the US version is much weaker than varieties in other jurisdictions, although its presence is a reminder that even in the world’s freest speech jurisdiction, freedom is not absolute.

Punishment for seditious libel was three hours on the pillory, and it is the pillory that features on the book’s cover. As Tomkins recounts, the pillory could be downright dangerous if a given scribbler was unpopular, and it’s also worth remembering that other crimes were punished in the same way (famously, homosexuality). Onlookers’ ability to tell the difference should not be assumed, although famous and beloved writers—Daniel Defoe, for example—could and did experience three hours of enhanced popularity and public displays of affection.

Seditious libel—and what it was designed to prevent—provides one of Tomkins’s most splendid analogy engines, because with the end of licensing came humanity’s first experience of an absolute avalanche of what we now call fake news. Seditious libel was designed to stop the spread of conspiratorial nonsense. And the pernicious efforts of one lunatic individual were within living memory to give the law impetus.

A gay, defrocked clergyman, Titus Oates, was the author of some truly deluded nonsense, a kind of supercharged Early Modern Carl Beech. Today, the worst accusation you can make against a public figure is paedophilia. Then, it was Catholicism. Oates claimed there was a plot to overthrow Charles II, install his Catholic brother as King, and repress Protestantism by force. The “Popish Plot” was bunkum on par with Russiagate or QAnon, but in the moral panic that ensued, one set of politicians spotted an opportunity to dish their rivals, and the other banded together for self-defence (and afterwards revenge). While further examples of widespread fake news from the period can plausibly be blamed in part on the printing press—the Malleus Maleficarum was an early bestseller—Oates reached upwards to the great and good, revealing the extent to which elites can also fall prey to conspiracism. Some two dozen innocent Catholic aristocrats went to the gallows as traitors. Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, was hanged, drawn, and quartered.

What is particularly notable is the heft of the people who—although opposed to licences for writers—remained convinced of the importance of seditious libel (or something like it) to stand athwart figures like Oates and yell STOP before they brought civil society down on itself. They included Johnson, Swift, Defoe—yes, despite his stint in the pillory—and Sir William Blackstone. Swift and Defoe in particular thought that seditious libel existed for witty and ironic writers—like them—to dodge around, plain-speaking ordinary folk be damned. This attitude probably contributed to them losing the argument. Mind you, their opponents were also individuals of courage and talent: John Wilkes, John Entick, and Thomas Paine.

A significant part of the gradual shift away from seditious libel was states learning—over time—to draw a meaningful distinction between words and deeds, speech and acts. Writing something that put a flea in the government’s ear came no longer to be seen as per se seditious, except insofar as it led to the common law offence of unlawful assembly. Already, the UK’s ongoing and awkward relationship with public order offences is visible on the horizon. Already, the reality that the truth doesn’t always out in the marketplace of ideas is apparent.

Offence

At first, Tomkins’s “age of offence” can look a bit like heresy redux—after all, religion in the haughty high morality of the Victorian era was a powerful force—but closer examination reveals the extent to which offence in its fight with freedom of speech leant on civil society and voluntary associations. It was the Society for the Suppression of Vice that, in 1819, brought a private prosecution against Richard Carlile for publishing Paine’s Age of Reason and Rights of Man. Carlile spent the next six years in gaol as a result.

However, private religion—in making use of blasphemous and obscene libel coupled with private prosecutions to get its moral way—opened the door to the kind of censorship with which we are all now familiar. That is, the public shaming of those whose words offend against whatever morality is dominant in the moment: call it cancel culture. The pillory was abolished in 1816. However, taking a man’s job from him for his views is probably as effective at bringing humiliation and calumnies down on his head as throwing rotten vegetables.

Hate speech legislation amounts to a confidence trick on Mill’s harm principle.

It is “social tyranny”—in John Stuart Mill’s words—that fuelled attacks on speech in his time (and ours), and it is with Mill’s words that modern people seek to defend freedom of speech against hounders and cancellers. The most important element, of course, inheres in Mill’s harm principle. That is, speech can only be interfered with (“restricted, censured, or censured” in Tomkins’s words) if it causes demonstrable harm to others. For Tomkins, mere offence can never reach this threshold, but he does admit the possibility of (narrowly defined) forms of hate speech doing so, which will no doubt put many American legal readers offside.

Hate Speech

For this reason, I set out Tomkins’s drafting rubric here. I also register my disagreement with it while recommending that people read and consider his wider argument in context. What he suggests may be the only politically acceptable fix to the vast mess that hate speech legislation has made in every Anglosphere and EU country save Australia and the United States. Australia, for its part, has a small hate speech mess—while the US has none—in part because Australia’s law on point follows Tomkins’s rubric quite closely:

My view, in the light of all the sources and contentions considered above, is that hate speech should be criminalised when, but only when, it meets all the following requirements. The words must be such that (1) a reasonable person would regard them as (2) threatening or abusive, where they are (3) expressed in public and (4) intended to stir up hatred on grounds of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or disability and (5) are unreasonable in the circumstances (having regard to the principle that freedom of expression may protect that which others may find offensive, shocking, or disturbing), noting that (6) discussion or criticism of questions of race, sex, sexual orientation, or disability is not to be taken as threatening or abusive and that (7) that neither discussion not criticism, nor expressions of antipathy, dislike, or ridicule as regards religion, are to be taken as threatening or abusive.

I mention Australia’s small hate speech mess, because its legislation—most famously section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, but laws at state level are similar—adheres to Tomkins’s advice with two deviations. It allows for “offence” (while still demanding an objective standard), but it also treats hate speech as a mere civil wrong. Incitement is criminal in Australia, as are cognate offences like issuing a threat to life using a carriage service, but a lot of hate speech that is criminal in the UK and EU will, in Australia, only ever be the subject of a costs order (if that). Australia also has nothing akin to non-crime-hate-incidents.

However, even with those careful safeguards in place, 18C was used against a campaigning journalist, Andrew Bolt, in a 2011 case that generated enormous heat, leading to Tony Abbott taking its repeal into a federal election (which he won, becoming prime minister in 2013). The law, however, is still on the books. Abbott failed to do much of anything while he was prime minister, while the debate engendered was poisonous to civil society.

Tomkins bases his argument for hate speech legislation on the idea of power differentials. “Should the law offer more support for victims, knowing that those who are on the receiving end of threats and abuse are not always in a position to fight back, even with words?” he asks at one point. I often see this claim, and I’m alert enough to be able to detect Michel Foucault’s fingerprints all over it. The problem with it is that it’s not true. It’s also arguable—if Tom Holland’s historical understanding of Western Christianity is correct—that it hasn’t been true for something like a hundred years. Victimhood is so advantageous a status that people are quite happy to invent entire new categories of victim under which they can then shelter their politics—transactivism comes to mind—followed by assaying out based on such alleged victimhood to make enormous and intemperate demands of their fellow-citizens.

Hate speech legislation amounts to a confidence trick on Mill’s harm principle. That is, by subjectivising “harm” and including psychological damage in its remit, the space for free expression is eaten. The harm principle is no defence against people who insist on equating spiritual or psychological harm with physical violence. In turn, free speech advocates then find free expression difficult to defend because they must first accept the reality of “harm” before setting out any positive arguments of their own. Even without hate speech’s troubled introduction during the Weimar Republic and its post-war promotion—for thoroughly nefarious reasons—by the USSR, worrying at the boundary between words and acts in this way is fraught with danger. I’m unconvinced there’s a good form of hate speech legislation, only worse or better. And the “better” Australian example suggests it’s very hard to get right.

Liberal democracies are, I suspect, still struggling with freedom of speech as a guiding principle because of its youth. Tomkins is right to isolate it from other core components of liberal constitutionalism and point out that it’s still in the legal equivalent of cinema’s Development Hell. Other things both complex and difficult to manage—take the secret ballot, for example—have been around long enough to develop regular and settled usages in a way free speech hasn’t. The whole world has implemented Australia’s nineteenth-century re-purposing of the ancient Roman system, for example. That is, we have a secret ballot where—unlike the Roman method—electors do not bring their pre-filled ballot to the polling place, but a state official gives them an unmarked, pre-printed one before they enter the voting booth.

At some point, freedom of speech may have a regular and settled usage in much the same way. On the Law of Speaking Freely suggests that time is still somewhat distant.