Category: Books

Lenin, Stalin, and Hitlerio

Historian Robert Gellately has written an unconventional and interesting book, according to this review in The Economist:

IN THEIR different ways they were as bad as each other, the three monsters of 20th-century Europe. That is an oddly controversial statement. Hitler is almost universally vilified; Lenin remains entombed on Red Square as Russia’s most distinguished corpse; and modern Russia is looking more kindly on Stalin’s memory.

Robert Gellately elegantly scrutinises their differences and highlights their similarities. He places all three men in the context of a Europe shattered by the first world war. “Before 1914 they were marginal figures,” he writes, without “the slightest hope of entering political life.” The whirlwind of destruction that started in 1914 turned their fantasies of racial purity and class dictatorship into reality, killing people on a scale unknown in human history.

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Sunic’s Homo americanus and the American psychological commonweal

Heritage and Destiny is a quarterly magazine printed in England and promulgated by the rockface scalers of the England First Party and the British People’s Party.  It produces some good work, and an example was sent me today by Tom Sunic: a review of his Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age by Peter Rushmore.

In the course of the review Rushmore observes Sunic’s treatment of Christian Zionism:-

Dr Sunic does not present Christian Zionism as some crude conspiracy of venal pastors and crypto-Jews. Nor does he view the U.S.-Zionist embrace (as more shallow analyses by more orthodox political commentators have tended to) as merely contingent on the ‘neoconservative’ reaction (developing out of early American Trotskyism) against Stalinist anti-Semitism.

His approach is to set Christian Zionism in the context of America’s broader political culture. Dr Sunic maintains that a fundamental deceit is at the core of the American system, just as it was behind the Iron Curtain. But most victims of Soviet tyranny had seen through the official lies decades before the system’s final collapse and had been only maintaining a polite fiction of believing in communist ideology.

... the Holocaust:-

Dr Sunic quotes Jean Baudrillard, the postmodernist critic of America, who has died since this book went to press, to support his argument that the “constant verbal and visual featuring of Jewish Holocaust symbolism” creates a “saturation process among the audience as was once the case with former Holocaust symbolism”. Relentless exterminationist propaganda, not to mention the vicious persecution of those who dissent from the dominant ideology, becomes self defeating.

In Baudrillard’s words even the image of Auschwitz itself - the holy of holies - becomes hyperreality: “not a site of annihilation but a medium of dissuasion”. In other words the exterminationists themselves eventually transform Auschwitz in the public mind from a “historical fact” to a propaganda or marketing tool.

... and, quoting from the text of Homo americanus itself, American anti-semitism:-

Yet Dr Sunic goes on, in a section which should be compulsory reading for many in the movement, especially the many varieties of Christian “anti-Semite”, to reject the most obvious forms of Jewish conspiracy theory.

“Blaming American Jews for extraterrestrial powers and their purported conspiracy to subvert Gentile culture borders on delusion and only reflects the absence of dialogue. American anti-Semitic delusions only provide legitimacy to American Jews in their constant search for a real or surreal anti-Semitic boogieman around the corner. Without the spectre of anti-Semitism, Jews would likely assimilate quickly and hence disappear. Thus, anti-Semitism provides Jews with alibis to project themselves as victims of Gentile prejudice. Consequently, it assigns them a cherished role of posing as the sole educational super-ego for Americans and by proxy the entire world.”

But many who read Sunic’s quite compact book will find not his stance on Jewry in America to be the most interesting thing about it but the deconstructionism that he commends for the postmodern American personality itself.  Rushmore merely notes:-

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Prindle’s America: An Appreciation, Part 2

Part Two: The Second Front

Prindle believes that all religions are projections of the mind or minds that imagine them. “As projections they comment on the cleanliness or foulness of the projectors.”

The notion of God to the western mind means the Yahweh of the Old Testament. The Jews fantasy is that God chose a particular people to be the bearers and disseminators of his word to all the peoples of the world. The English came to believe the scepter had been passed to them while the East Anglians who eventually formed the Liberal religion believe the scepter has passed to them.

The history of the Jews since their defeat and scattering by the Romans has been a succession of failed messiahs - more than sixty since they rejected Jesus. Failure has modified, but not eliminated this messianic obsession.

Prindle believes that stirrings of European Enlightenment in the seventeenth century were a significant factor in persuading the rabbis to stop recognizing Messianic claimants. “Science points out the absurdity of religious projections.  Thus all religions were shown to be based on false premises.”

Prindle points out that Christianity, Islam and Judaism were all faced with the challenge of scientific thinking. They all have a vested interest in the old way of perceiving the world.

The Jews had always been able to hold their own theologically vis-a-vis the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, but they had no chance against Science which granted none of their claims. Their only alternative was to corrupt Science and destroy it from within.

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Prindle’s America: An Appreciation, Part 1

This is the second of my essays on the little known but altogether exceptional work of R. E. Prindle, following my appreciation of his insights into Freud and the death of the West.  This essay will focus on Prindle’s The Deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America.

I hope these essays will encourage others to read deeply in the Corpus Prindeliana.

Part One: The First Front

“The key problem for American history is why the Civil War was fought.

Propaganda teaches American schoolchildren the war was about Black slavery. But Prindle points out that none of the cultures involved had ever been opposed to slavery historically.

Prindle asserts the cultural roots of the conflict began with the conquest of Anglo-Saxon England by William the Conqueror in 1066.

The conflict began when the conquering Normans enslaved the Anglo-Saxons, especially those of East Anglia.  The issue then is that like the biblical Hebrews the Anglo-Saxons objected to their own ill-treatment only.  Neither culture objected to slavery in itself.

The East Anglian Puritans who seized power in England under Cromwell expatriated tens of thousands of Irish to the Caribbean islands as slaves to work cheek by jowl with the Negro slaves - no distinctions between the two.” In addition, the importation of African slaves was largely run by the Puritan merchants from New England; the South played almost no role in the procurement of slaves from overseas. “Thus both the Puritans of New England and the Cavaliers of Virginia had no particular aversion to slavery.  The true issue was not whether but who.”

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Prindle on Freud: Part II

This is a continuation and conclusion of my essay begun yesterday on the illuminating thought of R. E. Prindle.  And the question was: What were Freud’s reasons for wanting to destroy the concept of morality?

“Freud was severely emasculated in both his individual ego and in his group ego. He was in fact a practicing homosexual…. His group, the Jews, was and is a severely emasculated people. They have been since they walked away from Ur.” SOV1

Freud was fond of telling the story of his father and his hat. It seems that Mr. Freud related a story to Sigmund, or Sigismund as he was known then (his Hebrew name significantly was Solomon) of how when he was a young man walking down the street proudly wearing his new hat, a gentile knocked the hat from his head into the gutter, snarling, “Go get your hat, Jew.”

When Sigmund asked breathlessly what his father did, expecting a heroic response, the old gentleman laconically replied: “I stepped into the gutter and picked up my hat,” severely disappointing the young boy.

“Since Freud told and retold this story we may be forgiven for believing it had a profound effect on his young conscious and subconscious minds and possibly his “unconscious” too. On the one hand he may have been so ashamed of his father’s reaction that he shared his emasculation encapsulating it in his subconscious as a fixation. It is possible that this story either made or contributed to his homosexuality. On the other hand we know for a fact that it inflamed his group ego with an ardent desire for revenge against the gentiles.” SOV1

Freud’s father came from an area of the Pale known as Galicia. This area is very close to the homeland of the ecstatic variant of Judaism known as Hasidism, and in fact his father was a Hasid. The Hasid sect arose out of the period of the last great Jewish “Messiah”, Sabbatai Zevi. [or Shabbatai Zvi, etc.] SOV1

The Jews realized the true danger to their religious mental projection was Science. There was no religious argument effective against Science.  They would have to take a different approach. “That approach was to appropriate a science with mumbo jumbo then slowly eviscerate the science of its content while supposedly making it moral or in other words subservient to Jewish religious beliefs.  This required both bold assertions while suppressing discussion or channeling it so that it could be controlled.” DOERBA

“The date selected for the revolution was the period 1913-1928.” Born in 1856, in 1913 Sigmund Freud was fifty-seven years old. Freud was militantly Jewish. “He hated Europeans and the European culture.  There is no question but that he intended to replace it with the Jewish culture.  At what point he decided to manipulate the emerging science isn’t clear but probably by the time he began attending B’nai B’rith meetings in 1895.” DOERBA

”Freud defamed predecessors, mentors, and rivals while organizing psychoanalysis to exclude any opinion but his own….  He organized and controlled the magazines and publishing houses, while he controlled and convened the international congresses.  Following the Jewish Cultural model, no dissent was allowed - there is no freedom of expression in the Jewish Culture - if you refused discipline you were merely expelled.  Once expelled you were defamed and rendered inconsequential.  Marginalized in today’s terms.  The only analyst to survive this treatment was C. J. Jung who had an awful lot going for him.  I can’t think of another dissident who has survived to the present.” DOERBA

Prindle believes that Freud coordinated his research with the needs of the scheduled Jewish revolution. “By 1910 he had his theories in close to final form.  From 1915 on, especially after 1917 he was no longer developing his ideas but organizing them for use by the Revolution…. Thus his concepts of the unconscious and sex were tailored to upset the morality of European civilization.  His promulgated notions were meant to confuse and obfuscate.  When one combines Freud’s interpretation of the unconscious, sex and emasculation, all of which were worked out by 1915, one has in fact a potent weapon of psychological warfare ...

By the advent of the Russian Revolution then, through his association with B’nai B’rith Freud had prepared the Jewish cadres for some particularly dirty work….As the Russian Revolution marked the first great success of the Jewish Revolution, Freud now began to manipulate his scientific knowledge of hypnotism and psychology to confuse and obfuscate the minds of the EuroAmerican cultures while keeping his Culture’s mind focused on the work ahead.” DOERBA

Prindle believes the study of the French Revolution was the role of the men of B’nai “B’rith to which Freud was privy. “Little details pop up in his writing. In his 1914 On The History Of The Psychoanalytic Movement , he lets drop a line that the progress of the French Revolution had been charted and understood ... His role as the psychoanalyst would be to prepare the minds of the revolutionaries for the slaughtering to come while he probably also assisted in the damage control applications for the inevitable reaction when the Europeans had realized what the Jews had done”. DOERBA

“Sometime after I wrote the first part of Something Of Value (see erbzine.com) I read David Bakan’s Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition: By David Bakan. (London: Bailey Bros. & Swinfen; New York: Schocken Books. 1965. Pp. 326. xxi.)]

“While Freud rejected Rabbinical religious Judaism he was deeply immersed in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar and Kabbalah. Thus one can discount his claim to be an ‘atheistic’ Jew.  Or atheism has a more specific meaning for him.” FAHU

[ Kabbalah (or cabala) is a medieval and modern system of Jewish theosophy, mysticism and thaumaturgy marked by belief in creation through emanation and a cipher method of interpreting Scripture.]

Prindle explains that the Zohar, or primary mystical book, which is attributed to the first and second century Rabbi, Simeon Ben Yohai, was reworked in twelfth century Spain by Moses de Leon and reached the Middle East after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the sixteenth century.  Its influence then was transmitted to the seventeenth century messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. “While Freud claimed to be scientific; Mr. Bakan relates almost all of Freud’s psychology to the Kabbalah showing Freud’s dependence on Sabbatianism and Frankism as I indicated in Something Of Value Part I.” FAHU

Prindle contends that Freud pretended to work as a scientist while he actually was blending in a bit of science with his Jewish religious material in order to subvert the European moral order. FAHU

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Prindle on Freud, Part I

While reading a review by E Michael Jones of Roy Schoeman’s book Salvation is from the Jews on Jones’ Culture Wars website I was taken aback by this:

“Karl Marx… wrote poetry dedicating himself to Satan as a young man, [as did] Sigmund Freud, about whom Paul Vitz (taking the lead of David Bakan) says much the same …”

I already knew that Hans Israel had proved that Freud was an inveterate liar in his Der Fall Freud: Die Geburt der Psychoanalyse aus der Lüge.  But the suggestion that Freud may have been a Satanist as well as a habitual liar looked well worth investigating.

I searched the terms “Freud”, “Satanist” and “Bakan” and I discovered that articles written by an R. E. Prindle containing these terms had appeared in an ezine dedicated to Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan novels.

I was so uninformed that I did not know that Edgar Rice Burroughs had been a novelist. To me Tarzan meant comic books and movies. I had no idea that Joseph Stalin had found ERB (Edgar Rice Burroughs) sufficiently dangerous to assign Soviet agents to sabotage his writing career.

I have read five major articles by Mr. Prindle: Something of Value I, Something of Value II, Something of Value III, Freud and His Unconscious, and The Deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America, Part 1. I shall refer to these articles using the following abbreviations. SOV1, SOV2, SOV3, FAHU, and DOERBA.

My first appreciation of this astoundingly illuminating thinker will concentrate on Prindle’s insights about Freud and the death of the West. I hope that it will encourage others to read deeply in the Corpus Prindeliana.

To understand Freud’s role in the intentional subversion of Western civilization one has to understand the historical processes at work on the eve of the First World War. Prindle reminds us that events can have remote roots that are ignored by people too focused on the short-term and the immediate.

Now Prindle has described one stream of destructive thought that has flowed from Medieval France into the revolutionary turmoil of the world since 1789.

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Tom Sunic’s Homo americanus is published

Dr Tomislav Sunic’s new book, Homo Americanus is finally available at Amazon, price $15.99.

I will be reviewing it in the next couple of weeks.  But I can tell you now that it argues the case for equivalency between Homo sovieticus and Homo americanus in every respect save one - where the former failed the test of time the latter has succeeded, but the answer to what succeeds him may be nothing.

American readers will be challenged by this portrait of American culture and Personality.  But the honest reader will recognise its truths, and close the book a wiser man.

Book review of “Breeding between the Lines” by Alon Ziv

This is a book review of “Breeding between the lines: Why interracial people are healthier and more attractive,” by Alon Ziv, 184 pp., Barricade Books, 2006, ISBN: 1569803064. My preliminary impression that the book most likely doesn’t have decent data in it is confirmed.

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The fall of aristocratic truth-telling

Last Spring, Peter Oborne wrote a book entitled The Rise of Political Lying. Documenting the sheer volume and brazenness of the lies told to us by politicians of all stripes, it was supposed to be impartial, objective and non-partisan. Considering that Oborne is fairly well known as a right-wing journalist, these claims were probably necessary to forestall accusations of bitterness-inspired anti-Labour propaganda.

Unfortunately, the book is simply impartial to the point of surrealistic comedy. Judging by its contents, literally everyone lies and there is damn all anybody can do about it (after all, offering a solution would be “partisan”).

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Correcting Charles Murray’s Accomplishment Metric for Complicty

Charles Murray uses citation analysis to account for “human accomplishment” in his book by that name. However he failed to take into account the fundamentally important accomplishment: negative numbers.  He therefore assigns a positive value for citations which might be best viewed as a negation of human accomplishment.  Examples of such negative accomplishments might be such works as ”Das Kapital” (which set political economy back a century), ”Civilization and its Disconents” (which set psychology back a century), ”Anthropology and Modern Life” (which set sociology back a century) and ”The Genetic Basis for Evolution Change” (which set human ecology back at least a generation).  He could have avoided this fatal error of epistemology by using a truly important human accomplishment that’s over a century old: Factor analysis.

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The Sick, The Weird, and The Democratic

The Revolt Against the Modern World
Julius Evola
Inner Traditions International

The Germanic populations - just like the Goths, the Longobards, the Burgundians and the Franks - were looked down upon as barbarians by that decadent “civilization” that had been reduced to juridical administrative structure and that had degenerated into “Aphrodisiac” forms of hedonistic urban refinement, intellectualism, aestheticism, and cosmopolitan dissolution. And yet in their coarse and unsophisticated forms of their customs one could find the… principles of honor, faithfulness, and pride. It was precisely this “barbaric” element that represented a vital force, the lack of which had been one of the main causes of Roman and Byzantine decadence.

How can one describe Evola’s The Revolt Against the Modern World, is it a radical reinterpretation of History or is it a metaphysical survey of the last 4000 years? Though Evola’s work is centered on the European experience it extends also into Indian and Chinese thought.

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Charles Murray ===>

All of us know the co-authored book The Bell Curve (out of print!) as Murray’s magnus opus. Another book less cited, but just as important is Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, just an FYI if you are looking for a good read.

Guessedworker, could you post a banner photo of William Shockley?

Culture of Critique in Russian

A Russian translation of Kevin MacDonald’s “Culture of Critique” is now available here (pdf).

Aside from white Americans I can’t think of any group that would need to read this more than Russians (and Ukrainians ...).

So, please alert any Russians you know who might be interested or who might benefit from KMD’s mighty thesis.  Doesn’t matter whether they are individuals or groups or even Russian-literate Slavs.

A happy “Right-wing extremist”

Some thoughts inspired by the latest book from David Horowitz: “The End of Time” (Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2005)

The Left commonly describe David Horowitz as a “Right-wing extremist”.  They thus put a pro-Israel agnostic Jew in the same company as antisemites—once again illustrating the grossly simplistic black-and-white thinking that is characteristic of the Left.

I think David’s latest book, however, clarifies exactly what he is.  David has kindly just sent me an autographed copy of it.  I get lots of books for one reason or another but rarely read much of them.  I have read so many books in my 61 years on this earth (when I was aged 8 I was already reading three books a week) that I mostly just read articles now.  So when I picked up David’s book, I expected just do do a quick scan.  Instead I sat down and read it right through.  The book crams an immense amount of thought into 155 pages but it is all expressed with such simplicity and clarity that it is for all that not the slightest labour to read. I have always said that obscure writing betrays confused thinking and that clear thinking yields clear expression.  David’s book is an excellent example of the latter.

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A review of “Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature” by D & N Barash

Review by JOHN DERBYSHIRE

It is 41 years now since zoologist William D. Hamilton worked out the evolutionary mathematics of kin altruism, demonstrating that even behavior that seems to belong to the moral and educational superstructure of human nature can be explained by natural selection. Sociobiology was on the march.

That march did not, of course, go unopposed. The political Left was outraged at the suggestion that our nature might have something to do with our biology, and therefore might not be infinitely malleable. Could there, then, be no “New Soviet Man”? No withering away of all behavioral sex differences? No elimination of all preference for one’s own kin or ethny over those more distantly related? Perish the thought! The Left rallied under charismatic generals like the late Stephen Jay Gould, and battle was joined.

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Imperial Hubris. Why the West is losing the war on terror

Michael Scheuer’s book titled “Imperial Hubris. Why the West is losing the war on terror” is an astonishingly well researched book and it is written with a clarity of mind that is sorely lacking among contemporary writers. 

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Social justice, human rights and public policy

I have just been reading a book with the title given above.  It is written by a Scotsman named Hugh V. McLachlan, at Glasgow Caledonian University.  He looks at the usual Leftist claims about social justice and human rights and applies relentless logic to them.  And he covers what could be fairly abstruse philosophical questions in a remarkably clear and simple way.  It would be a very good book for people who want to get their thinking clear on many of the usual Left/Right issues.

He starts out trying to makes sense of postmodernism but rightly concludes that it is self-refuting.  To simplify a little, postmodernists claim that no statement is true but if that is so then all statements made by postmodernists are also untrue.  So why should we heed them?  Fun!  Applying logic like that to postmodernists does not bother them at all of course.  They only aim to sound clever, not to clarify or explain anything.  They would only be bothered if everybody laughed at them and since lots of people seem to take them seriously, they are happy with their “ideas”.

McLachlan devotes a fair bit of space to the concept of “rights”, “fairness” and “justice” but he also applies his conclusions to things like health care, inequality, education, unemployment, affirmative action, poverty and taxation.  His approach is as a philosopher rather than as an economist so his views are “moderate” rather than being outright conservative.  He does for instance think that Britain’s nationalized health service is justifiable in some form.  But that perspective probably helps if one is going to take any of his arguments into discussions with Leftists.

There is more about the book here.  Prof. McLachlan can be contacted on

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

A Review:
The Sorrows of Empire : Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic ,
by Chalmers Johnson

What a pity the collapse of authentic conservatism in America. Yes, there are a few voices in the wilderness like Chronicles and the American Conservative Magazines, yet America’s reactionary heartland slowly died, killed by Cold-War crusading and the naked imperialism of Bush and Clinton.

I first heard of Chalmers Johnson’s book The Sorrows of Empire at Scott Horton’s Weekend Interview Show. Despite Horton’s fuzzy Libertarianism and cultural Marxism I was impressed with Johnson’s argument: the transformation of America into a militaristic and imperialistic state.

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How Governments are Overthrown

A Review
The Anatomy of Revolution, by Crane Brinton

“Modern wars seem to carry with them the necessity for organizing civil government along military lines, for the exercise of strong, centralized governmental authority in which the liberty of the individual is far from a matter of first concern, in which there is very little debate, very little of the government by discussion so prized by the moderates, very little compromise and moderation. War said Madison is the mother of executive aggrandizement...”

One can look at American post-war history as ceaseless revolution, the engine of which is the military-industrial complex fueled by international crises and domestic anarchy, being engineered by the state itself. Unlike anytime before in US history sustained executive power has eroded American liberties and legislative sovereignty, indeed this is an unacknowledged revolution.

Crane Brinton’s book does not, however, describe the calamitous events of contemporary America.  First published in 1938 and revised in 1965 its scope is confined to a comparison and contrast of four previous revolutions: the English (1640), American (1776), French (1798), and Russian (1917).

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Windschuttle on the Anglosphere

Keith Windschuttle has a good review of Jim Bennett’s book: The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century.  Excerpt:  “Whatever the outcome, The Anglosphere Challenge is one of the important books of our time. It establishes the centrality of British culture to the economic, technological, and political prospects of the world. The ancient traditions of the British — individual rights and responsibilities, minimal government, and a strong civil society — constitute the most reliable formula for a future that works. Even if that future turns out to be less confined to countries of British descent than Bennett predicts, it is highly likely still to be dominated by their cultural values and traditions.”

Review - Stalin’s War of Extermination: 1941 -1945

“War with Germany is coming, whether Germany wants it or not.”
Stalin speaking to a Red Army assembly, May 5, 1941

Stalin’s War of Extermination: 1941 -1945, by Joachim Hoffman
Theses and Dissertations Press, 1999

In so far as anyone cares to think about the war between Germany and Russia the causes for it are neatly packaged, like fast-food, for quick consumption:  1) Hitler contrived war against the USSR, a nation a peace with Germany and which sought accommodation with Germany; 2) further investigation details the secret pacts and trade deals brokered between Germany and the USSR, which Stalin, it is said, scrupulously honored as to avoid any conflict with Hitler.

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The Conservative Tradition

John Ray on this site a few days ago postulated the interesting theory that Benjamin Disraeli christened Conservatism in order to confuse the opposition, by claiming it to be what it wasn’t.  Apart from the questionable claim that the socially legislating Disraeli was ever a Conservative at all, this theory suffers from one problem: when Conservatism was christened, in January 1830, Disraeli was an unknown and heavily indebted 25 year old peddler of penny stocks, who if asked his politics would have claimed “Radical,” while trying to sell you shares in a South American gold mine. 

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Idolizing Castro:  New book from Regnery

Castro is the “charming and idealist” dictator loved by Hollywood, academia, and the liberal media. However, what The New York Times doesn’t tell you is that behind his charisma lies a merciless dictator and mass murderer who outnumbered the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate during his first three months in power. In Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, journalist, acclaimed author, and Cuban emigre Humberto Fontova shatters the myths and exposes the truth about the liberal elites’ love affair with Castro-revealing the propaganda of media inaccuracies of the past forty-three years.

Fidel is a shocking confirmation of how one dictator has murdered, impoverished, and tyrannized a country that once had the eleventh highest living standard in the world-yet remains American liberals’ favorite dictator. In hundreds of interviews with former Castro regime officials, anti-Castro freedom fighters, and Castro’s political prisoners, Fontova reveals the truth about “Cuba’s President.” Fidel discloses horrific tales of the Castro regime, including his failed terrorist plot on New York City, atrocious human rights record, and blood-drenched Cuban Revolution.

Fuller book details here

Book Review:  Great Conservatives, by Martin Hutchinson

Three decades ago Martin Hutchinson sat down to write a ‘coffee table’ book about the significant figures in Conservative history.  Not a remarkable ambition in itself, perhaps.  To many on the right of the Party the Heathite Corporatism of the early 1970’s looked like the end of the ideological road.  For all its allegedly free enterprise vision of ‘Selsdon Man’, Heath’s Tories had proved wholly unable to think outside the post-war economic consensus.  While direct taxes were cut to a certain extent, both major parties remained committed to a public sector vastly larger than anyone would seriously advocate now.

The eleven-year, partial and, therefore, temporary revival of the right under Margaret Thatcher still lay in the future.  It was the moment to think historically of Conservatism - and the moment no doubt, amid the sound and fury of Saltley and the three day week, to conclude that its like might not be seen on our national stage again.

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Five Books

The following are five books which serve as reference points to compare and contrast other books. Of course my library is not constrained by these five, and I subscribe to periodicals. I welcome comments from those that have read these books, I wish to discuss them.

Please post the books you find important, many are probably like me always looking for new thinkers and their ideas. In Guessedworker’s recent post I discovered Alain de Benoist.

The Revolt of the Masses, by Jose Ortega y Gasset
The Rise and Decline of the State, by Martin van Creveld
Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England: Volume 1, 2, by Maurice Cowling
Odes, Horace
The Idea of a Christian Society, by T.S. Eliot