It speaks volumes for the state of America’s political dialogue that a new book defending nation-building mentions the word “Islam” in passing just twice, not counting footnotes or index. Robert Kagan reviews Prof. Jeremi Suri’s little tome entitled Liberty’s Surest Guardian: Nation-Building From the Founders to Obama in Sunday’s New York Times….
It is astonishing that Prof. Suri, who holds an important chair at the University of Texas at Austin, could publish a book on the subject without so much as a nod towards the cultural, religious, and sociological issues that make democracy in the Muslim world a vastly different proposition than in Italy. And it is just as lamentable that Robert Kagan would lump the Catholic Philippines of 1900 together with the Muslim Afghanistan of 2011, as if such issues made no difference at all.
To Kagan, Suri, and most of the nation-builders, religion does not make a difference, for they all come out of a school of “political philosophy” that believes (with Thomas Hobbes) that religion is useful for socializing the masses but never to be taken seriously, and that what human beings really care about is individual self-preservation.
Read it all.
David Goldman–The Scandal of the Secular Mind
It speaks volumes for the state of America’s political dialogue that a new book defending nation-building mentions the word “Islam” in passing just twice, not counting footnotes or index. Robert Kagan reviews Prof. Jeremi Suri’s little tome entitled Liberty’s Surest Guardian: Nation-Building From the Founders to Obama in Sunday’s New York Times….
It is astonishing that Prof. Suri, who holds an important chair at the University of Texas at Austin, could publish a book on the subject without so much as a nod towards the cultural, religious, and sociological issues that make democracy in the Muslim world a vastly different proposition than in Italy. And it is just as lamentable that Robert Kagan would lump the Catholic Philippines of 1900 together with the Muslim Afghanistan of 2011, as if such issues made no difference at all.
To Kagan, Suri, and most of the nation-builders, religion does not make a difference, for they all come out of a school of “political philosophy” that believes (with Thomas Hobbes) that religion is useful for socializing the masses but never to be taken seriously, and that what human beings really care about is individual self-preservation.
Read it all.