Claremont Review of Books

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity,

by Paul Kingsnorth. Thesis, 368 pages, $32

The historian of science E.J. Dijksterhuis memorably characterized the scientific revolution of the early modern period as a “mechanization of the world picture.” What did this amount to? And what was the character of the prev...

Several times in Love and Virtue in a Secular Age, Ralph C. Hancock commends his chief interlocutor, the French political philosopher Pierre Manent, for his “humble audacity.” That is equally an attribute of Hancock’s own book. A professor of political science at Brigham Young University, Hancock has significantly advanced one of Manent’s core projects—that of “recon...

After watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in a sold-out IMAX theater, my husband and I were heading for the exit when we were attacked by smiling employees brandishing free rolled-up posters. Raising our shields, we broke through their phalanx, leaped aboard our vessel moored in the parking lot, and sailed homeward with only a few posters glancing off the moonro...

The first marriage in Tuscan history was not between a man and a woman but between a vine and a tree. Before the Etruscans cleared these hills, they were dense with oakwood, through which wild grape vines climbed naturally toward the canopy, wedded to the forest in which they grew. The Etruscans formalized that marriage. Vines were trained up living maples, elms, and poplars....

Michael Anton’s Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy is an engaging, intelligent, and sobering work. Anton believes or hopes that the book’s essays “form something like a coherent whole.” This characterization is at once modest and immodest as befits the volume, which gratefully and repeatedly acknowledges Harvey Mansfield (to whom the book is dedicated), Le...