“Rounding Up” is a newsletter rounding up various links, newsletters, and podcasts from the perspective of political reform. If you’d like to join this experiment, please subscribe.
If you have any newsletters you think I should be following or any tips, feel free to drop me a line (through Twitter, email, etc.). Check out @fredbauerblog or fredbauerblog via gmail.
Thanks, as always, for reading!
According to a new essay by Dimitrios Halikias, Adam Smith believed that sometimes state power was necessary to create the conditions for modern commerce:
Smith does not assume that commercial institutions will inevitably emerge as a product of organic social evolution. History suggests that their emergence is contingent, and that certain political preconditions are necessary before natural improvement can take root. Once introduced, commercial society might beable to run on its own, needing only an occasional pruning by a Hayekian gardener-statesman. But the initial construction of commercial society itself may require a more active exertion of state power. That, at least, is the lesson of the Scottish Highlands, a case study in the necessity of state intervention to overcome conditions of feudalism and to secure conditions of commerce.
The “Law and Liberty” forum on liberty (flagged by “Rounding Up” a few weeks ago) continues, with not one but two recommendations to read more Roman law (via Helen Dale and Sam Goldman).
Matt Lewis and Tom Ricks chat about what the American Founders learned from the Romans (and Montesquieu).
Dominic Lynch looks at the politics of crisis, from ancient Rome to the present-day United States:
Crisis after crisis has left the federal government stumbling without a chance to catch its breath. The cumulative effect over time is to delegitimize the government as an effective force to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty,” as the Constitution says. Compounding the government’s self-inflicted wounds is a direct challenge to the constitutional order that, while still in its infancy, is a philosophy incompatible with the established order.
Prolonged crises, damaged legitimacy, and stalemate are what elevate individual events into the event: the Long Crisis.
Marshall Auerback says that geopolitics may provide an incentive for more populist domestic policies:
National developmentalism coheres with national security objectives, as Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. secretary of the Treasury, argued in his Report on Manufactures, when he advocated a comprehensive strategy to make the U.S. “independent on foreign nations for military and other essential supplies.”
(Shameless plug: I commented on the intersection of geopolitics and domestic reform in a piece earlier this year.)
Ever prolific, Adam Tooze has started a newsletter, too! In a recent issue, he considers some of the intellectual stakes of “state capitalism” for the People’s Republic of China: “But the trajectory of China’s state capitalism also has broader historical implications: Should we expect liberalism’s preconceptions about the logic of economic development to be confirmed in China, or not?”
Razib Khan looks at the influence of Confucius in China. Companion piece: James Hankins on Legalism, Confucianism, and the legitimization of rule.
Michael Lind: “Countervailing power, yes; antitrust, maybe.”
Alex Gutentag argues that the coronavirus crisis has exacerbated class polarization:
California Governor Gavin Newsom sends his children to in-person private school while mandating virtual education for California public schools. He announced a second statewide lockdown just a few weeks after attending an indoor, unmasked dinner with lobbyists at a Michelin three star restaurant where meals can cost up to $850 per person. Newsom is just one of many politicians, elites, and bureaucrats who break the rules. A static social order is being solidified. In our new caste system the wealthy have political and social privileges because they are considered clean and disease-free, while the more low-income someone is, the more they are treated as contaminated.
Speaking of coronavirus…Rich Lowry, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Charles CW Cooke talk the COVID relief bill, vaccine politics, and holiday memories. (And it is a relief bill, Andrew Stuttaford insists.)
John Podhoretz, Noah Rothman, Christine Rosen, and Abe Greenwald discuss some of the latest theories of medical ethicists.
Aaron Sibarium also looks at the “woke” turn in medical ethics.
Matt Yglesias on the goal of full employment in 2021.
From the archives: A 2006 piece on the Gershwins by Stefan Kanfer.
In this season of holidays about waiting, the Dutch artist Gerard van Honthorst’s Adoration of the Shepherds:
2020 has been a year of loss and trial. But the glow of hope—of relief and babies and renewal—still endures.
Happy holidays, everyone!