Friday, August 12, 2011
Mary Ann Glendon's The Forum and the Tower
The Wall Street Journal has a review of Mary Ann Glendon's new book, The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt. The book is a study of figures who sought to reconcile the scholarly life with politics: Plato, Cicero, Justinian, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Coke, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Tocqueville, Weber, Holmes, and, finally, Eleanor Roosevelt and other framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As the reviewer (Brian Anderson, editor of City Journal) notes:
The Forum and the Tower benefits from Ms. Glendon's own divided calling. Her experience as the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, in 2008-09, clearly informs her sympathetic treatment of the frustrated political ambitions of Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber, whose achievements proved to be almost entirely intellectual; her scholarly mastery of the law makes her chapters on Oliver Wendell Holmes and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights particularly luminous.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/08/mary-ann-glendons-the-forum-and-the-tower.html
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By all rights this is a must read. Kudos to Professor Glendon. By the way, as luck would have it I address some of the same issues though from a somewhat different starting point in my new 2nd edition of The Empire Strikes a Match in a World Full of Oil.
We as a world have to make a choice, and we have little breathing room in which to make it before the consequences of further dithering become rather intolerable. We have to choose whether we want a world in which Might makes Right -- as Mr. Cheney prefers -- or one in which the Rule of Law governs.
The world will always be confronted with this choice, so in a sense there is no hurry, but in practice the opportunity to have that choice deferred and sharpened painfully by a new world war at this time is fast evaporating.