George Scialabba

How Democratic Is the American Constitution? By Robert Dahl. Yale University Press, 198 pages, $19.95 In the Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy(1996), Daniel Lazare points out that the U.S. Constitution was adopted unconstitutionally. The Articles of Confederation, our first governing compact, contained a provision that any amendment would require the consent of […]

As many astute observers have pointed out, controversial new ideas are assimilated in three stages. First they’re false and pernicious, then they’re true but trivial, and finally they’re what everyone claims to have believed all along. I see nothing to disprove this time-tested formula in the case of Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of […]

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World By Lawrence Lessig. Random House, 352 pages, $30.00 Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity By Siva Vaidhyanathan. New York University Press, 243 pages, $27.95 A specter is haunting culture: the specter of intellectual-property law. Soon […]

The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty, by David G. Myers. Yale University Press, 414 pages, $29.95. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, by Robert Edwards Lane. Yale University Press, 465 pages, $35.00. Over the portal of modernity is written Kant’s famous definition: “What is Enlightenment? It is humankind’s emergence from […]

The Next Deal: The Future of Public Life in the Information Age, by Andrei Cherny. Basic Books, 268 pages, $24.00. John Stuart Mill, in his essay on Coleridge, remarks that “a knowledge of thespeculative opinions of men between twenty and thirty years of age is the greatsource of political prophecy.” If Mill is right, then […]

Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice, by Alan Wolfe. W.W. Norton 224 pages, $24.95. As every parent knows, sometimes the only answer to “Why?” is “Because I say so.” For a long time that was, at least in form, the most common answer to society’s ultimate why question: “Why be […]

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Louis Menand. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 480 pages, $27.00. Not long ago the philosopher Daniel Dennett called Darwinism–the theory of evolution by means of natural selection–“the best idea ever.” It is certainly one of the most consequential. As an explanation of an enormous range of biological […]