Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books

Charles R. Kesler, John B. Kienker

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9798216209867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the past 10 years, the Claremont Review of Books has become one of the preeminent conservative magazines in the United States, offering bold arguments for a reinvigorated conservatism that draws upon the timeless principles of the American Founding and applies them to the moral and political problems we face today. With essays by the likes of William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Hitchens, Richard Brookheiser, James Q. Wilson, Allen C. Guelzo, Victor Davis Hanson, Ross Douthat, and many others, this collection surveys the range of issues addressed in the Claremont Review of Books first decade, from the conservative critique of American progressivism to foreign policy, politics, history, and culture. Liberally illustrated with art director Elliot Banfield's popular cartoons, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness provides the magazine's many devotees with a treasured keepsake of a tumultuous decade and will be of interest to all those who care about American politics and culture.

Among the contributors are Hadley Arkes, Martha Bayles, the late William F. Buckley, Jr., Paul Cantor, James Ceaser, Joseph Epstein, Christopher Flannery, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred McClay, Cheryl Miller, the late Jaroslav Pelikan, Joseph Tartakovsky, Michael Uhlmann, Algis Valiunas, William Voegeli, and the late James Q. Wilson.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: PROGRESSIVISM ANDTHE LIBERAL CENTURY
• Taming Big Government
• A Nicer Form of Tyranny
• Why the Election of 1912 Changed America
• FDR as Statesman
• The Endless Party
• Involuntary Associations
• A Left-Handed Salute
• Flights of Fancy
• Part II. RENEWING CONSERVATISM
• The Conservative Challenge
• The Right Stuff
• Civil Rights and the Conservative Movement
• The Myth of the Racist Republicans
• The Long Detour
• Why Conservatives Lost the War of Ideas
• The Conservative Cocoon
• Tailgunner Ann
• Part III. THE WAR WE ARE IN
• Victory: What It Will Take to Win
• War in the Absence of Strategic Clarity
• Leo Strauss and American Foreign Policy
• Democracy and the Bush Doctrine
• Tribes of Terror
• The Home Front: Left, Right, and (Elusive) Center
• Theater of War
• Why We Don’t Win
• Intermezzo: A Portfolio of Illustrations from the Claremont Review of Books
• Part IV. STATESMEN AND DESPOTS
• Aristotle and Locke in the American Founding
• Moral Monster
• The Man Who Made Modern America
• Three-Fifths Historian
• How the Confederates Won
• The Bicentennial Lincolns
• Tyranny and Utopia
• Thoughts and Adventures
• The Greatness and Decline of American Oratory
• Part V. CURRENT CONTENTIONS
• Business as Usual
• The Presidential Nomination Mess
• Continental Drift
• France’s Immigrant Problem—and Ours
• Free to Use
• All the Leaves Are Brown
• Is Health Care a Right?
• Part VI. HEARTS AND MINDS
• Born American, But in the Wrong Place
• The Crisis of American National Identity
• The Debacle at Harvard
• The Education Mill
• Wimps and Barbarians
• Against the Virtual Life
• A Dance to the (Disco) Music of Time
• The Three Rings
• Part VII. ARTS, LITERATURE, AND LEISURE
• Building Democracy
• Pith and Pen
• Man of Letters
• Larry McMurtry and the American West
• The Genius of Old New York
• Aryan Sister
• Is There Intelligent Life on Television?
• Music, Philosophy, and Generation Y
• Macbeth and the Moral Universe
• Index
• List of Contributors
• List of Books Reviewed and Discussed*