Reviews for The purpose of authority?

The average rating for The purpose of authority? based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-04-22 00:00:00 Pamela Lemay A good primer into American Neo-Conservative thought. I was flabbergasted from the very first pages as to what counts as 'arguments' in the right flank of the debate surrounding redistributive justice. Going through these late seventies essays and positions is insightful for many reasons, one of which is to see how little has changed in the way America understand the relationship between justice, freedom and minorities. In short, neo-cons believe that freedom is so important that the administrative risks and costs necessary for the management of resources required for bringing about a more equal status for minorities is just not worth it. There are other arguments, but this idea keeps popping up again and again. I also found this text helpful for understanding how much nationalism and white supremacy are interlinked with the neo-conservative understanding of egalitarianism (i.e, what Lewis Schaeffer calls the ‘old’ egalitarianism), since it is clear that a lot of these authors are partially worried about the loss of the high (white European) culture that depends on a wealthy privileged class for its existence. This being written in 1979, worries are expressed that without rich people, ours would be a culture of The Beatles and not Beethoven. Lewis Schaeffer Introduction is wonderful, most of the time clearer and much more to the point that the essays it is reviewing.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-07 00:00:00 Michael Lucchesi I don't know enough about the scholarly debate over the term cosmopolitan to weigh in on that part of the debate, but Walkowitz's overall framing of cosmopolitan style in relation to modernism and close reading of works by the authors she associates with this style -- Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, Ishiguro, Rushdie, and Sebald -- is well done and illuminating.