Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift by Paul Rahe

“Let our motto be, as once it was, ‘Don’t tread on me!’ And let our virtue be individual responsibility.”

I had the pleasure of speaking recently with Paul Rahe, who is the author of Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocquville and the Modern Prospect (Yale University Press: 2009).

Professor Rahe’s book is the first of three that I will be recommending for summer reading in preparation for the RedState get-together in Atlanta on August 1st. Judging from the covers, this trio might not seem the lightest of reading but fortunately all three authors prove in their own styles that substantive reading doesn’t have to be a long, hard slog. And all three of them have important lessons for us in this lazy, off-election-cycle summer.

Over the months since the 2008 election, conservatives of all stripes have searched their souls and wrung their hands and gnashed their teeth over the apparent demise of our movement. Various proposals to reinvent, repackage and/or rebrand conservatism have been widely offered. My thought is that we might productively, with the assistance of these three excellent books, strive for another “r” word—renaissance.The word renaissance carries a number of meanings. Literally, it means “rebirth.” It is generally associated with the intense interest in classical antiquity that emerged in Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century. But as Erwin Panofsky pointed out in his Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, what we think of as the Italian Renaissance is just one in a long series of encounters with the classical past that continue to this day.

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