Richard Reinsch

What I’m reading this summer:

Pierre Manent, Seeing Things Politically. This book is a series of interviews with the French political theorist who counts himself heavily influenced by Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss. Manent famously observed that Europe is in the grip of a post-political, post-religious, and post-familial fog that leaves it incapable of decisive political action. In fact, he says in one interview, Europe will be made to learn in an unfortunate way that these realities of human existence cannot be dismissed. It will learn from the impotence of the EU’s conceit that republicanism is dead that politics and the need to act with an actual political body are indispensable.

Brad Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative. This is the first extensive biography of Russell Kirk, one that took the author years of research and archival work to put together. I interviewed Birzer about the book recently. It doesn’t come out from the University Press of Kentucky for a few more months, but I think it will prove to be the definitive treatment of this foundational conservative thinker. A few observations: Birzer doesn’t shy away from criticizing his subject. On one occasion he laments that Kirk permits himself to get pulled into the National Review and conservative movement in such a monolithic way. After his unflagging support for Goldwater, Kirk never recovered the national audience that The Conservative Mind possessed. Kirk became a conservative fixture. But could he have been more?

The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context, edited by Barry Alan Shain. Full disclaimer, this book is published by Liberty Fund Books and I am a fellow at Liberty Fund. I recommend it because it compiles in magisterial form the record of the three continental congresses that met and debated the terms of our disagreements with the British empire and slowly, reluctantly, and ineluctably approached separation and independence from the Empire. You will never read the Declaration the same way. Rather than seeing it, as we are taught to do, as a pure exercise in political philosophy, the book emphasizes its historic common law commitments and its production from American debates that had raged for decades. It also emphasizes British constitutionalism and the terms of debate between colonial leaders and the British Parliament—in short, self-government, the rights of Englishmen, and the misunderstandings that each side had of the other.

Richard M. Reinsch II is a fellow at Liberty Fund and the editor of Law and Liberty. He is the editor of the upcoming volume Seeking the Truth: An Orestes Brownson Anthology to be published by Catholic University Press of America in 2016.