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The Long View

The Long View: American Babylon

The Long View: American Babylon

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus liked to say the first thing about politics is that is not the first thing. Over the course of his life, Fr. Neuhaus was an active player in American politics, but he always tried to keep it in its proper place: In this understanding, it is

The Long View: How Rome Fell

The Long View: How Rome Fell

And now we have John's review/reflection on just how the Western Roman Empire became capable of falling. As John was keenly interested in cyclical theories of history, it should come as no surprise that John's analysis is a combination of decreasing state capacity occurring in

The Long View: The Fall of the Roman Empire

The Long View: The Fall of the Roman Empire

One of the things I enjoyed the most about John J. Reilly's book reviews is that he was not only a gifted summarizer, able to quickly sum up the key points of a book, he was knowledgeable enough to critique and expand upon those key points in interesting

The Long View 2009-04-09: Meetings, Bloody Meetings

The Long View 2009-04-09: Meetings, Bloody Meetings

John's very anodyne title for this blog post doesn't do justice to what he was thinking about here. John was using fiction, in this case mostly H. G. Well's The Shape of Things to Come, as a launching point to consider how the world

The Long View 2009-03-27: The Government of Exotic Space

The Long View 2009-03-27: The Government of Exotic Space

John J. Reilly continues to offer up bon mots. Here is John sounding a bit like Patrick McKenzie on cryptocurrencies: The space in which the financial system functions is not physical but mathematical. The various markets are an ensemble of virtual spaces, some of which have grown larger and more

The Long View 2009-03-20: The Iron Laws of History (Annotated)

The Long View 2009-03-20: The Iron Laws of History (Annotated)

John posted some bangers here: ...Hegel did retain the memory that the state was not merely a fence to keep out the state of nature, but a positive expression of the higher potentialities of human sociality. It is possible to imagine a state whose citizens are entities among whom violence

The Long View 2009-03-13

The Long View 2009-03-13

From the "line go up" point of view of simply looking at stock prices since 2009, it could be easy to forget how much heartache there really was in 2008/2009. Which is a very good reason to take all such assertions, historical or contemporary, under due consideration,