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The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us from Ourselves Hardcover – January 17, 2017
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Most of us probably don’t learn about Alexis de Tocqueville in school anymore, but his masterpiece, Democracy in America, is still surprisingly resonant. When he came to America in 1831 to study our great political experiment, he puzzled over our strange struggles with religion and politics, work and money, sex and gender, and love and death. Clearly we haven’t come as far as one might hope. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom―and it isn’t now. Tocqueville didn’t just catalog our problems; he provided a manual on how to flourish despite them. In The Art of Being Free, journalist and scholar James Poulos puts Tocqueville’s advice to work for a contemporary audience, showing us how to live sane, healthy, and happy lives amid our hectic, shifting world.
Poulos reveals what Tocqueville’s beloved study tells us about everything from our relationship to technology and our obsession with appearances to our workaholism, our listlessness, and our ways of coping with stress. He explores how our uniquely American malaise can be alleviated―not by the next wellness fad or self-help craze, but by the kind of fearless inventory-taking that has fallen out of fashion.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSt. Martin's Press
- Publication dateJanuary 17, 2017
- Dimensions5.77 x 1.17 x 8.54 inches
- ISBN-101250077184
- ISBN-13978-1250077189
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“James Poulos is one of the very few consistently interesting writers in America.”--Molly Ball, The Atlantic
"In a time of radical change, it's essential to connect with enduring values -- and that's what James Poulos has done with his fascinating look at Alexis de Tocqueville. With an engaging voice and an always lively mind, Poulos makes the old story new again, offering Americans hope and perspective in the art of being free."―John Avlon, The Daily Beast
“Poulos weaves personal history and literary analysis, high culture and pop culture, in this provocative, wholly unexpected take on Tocqueville’s best known work. He updates and intensifies Tocqueville’s diagnosis of American life, agitating against a frenzied democratic flattening that risks leaving us overstimulated, overworked, and alone. It’s a kind of erudite self-help that forgoes end-of-chapter bullet points for a galvanizing message of recognition and resistance.”--Kerry Howley, author of Thrown
"No happy rogue is better than James Poulos at laying bare just how ridiculous and insane American life really is."--Ben Dreyfuss, Mother Jones
“James Poulos is the new Tocqueville America needs right now."--Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week
“James Poulos blends lucid writing with ambitious thinking. The Art of Being Free skillfully applies the timeless truths that Tocqueville uncovered to the practical questions of daily life in our bizarre era. The result is nothing less than a roadmap for a better life. Read it, learn, and enjoy.”―Arthur Brooks, President, American Enterprise Institute
“In an earlier age of political and cultural confusion, Alexis de Tocqueville explained Americans to ourselves and to the world. James Poulos, in this smart and timely book, shows how Tocqueville’s teachings can make sense of our present age of terror and Tinder―and help us see tomorrow more clearly.”--Adam Keiper, editor of The New Atlantis
"For those citizens passionately committed to the pursuit of Life, Light, Love, and Liberty for all, James Poulos offers a stimulating celebration of the beautifully paradoxical nature of governmental policy as an institutional mechanism for securing true human freedom."― Andrew W.K.
“Brace yourself. James Poulos boldly, brilliantly shows that we can live freely even in our crazy age.”--Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs, author of The Fractured Republic
"In the most crazy-making year of politics in my lifetime, The Art of Being Free helped restore a little bit of my sanity as only a reflection steeped in history's lessons could do. The book was a reminder that much of what feeds our anxiety and dread challenged bygone generations―and that we possess many of the qualities that helped them to survive and even thrive! Drawing on the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville, James Poulos marries a political philosopher's understanding of a celebrated text to a sharp cultural critic's application of it to life today. Few pages pass without an intriguing insight about how to be better at being free."--Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
"James Poulos is a visionary at the forefront of ideas about liberty."―Judd Weiss
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Art of Being Free
How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us From Ourselves
By James PoulosSt. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2017 James PoulosAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-07718-9
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction,
Change,
Faith,
Money,
Play,
Sex,
Death,
Love,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Index,
About the Author,
Copyright,
CHAPTER 1
Change
We Americans have a relationship problem. And we can't stop talking about it. In fact, much like the stereotypical romantic relationship, our ambivalence extends to talking about it. We can't live with it. We can't live without it. And we can't shut up about it.
What's got us so muddled is deceptively simple: change.
It's "the one constant" in a world where "the only rule is that there are no rules." We love it so much that we use it interchangeably with progress or improvement, two of our favorite things. We hate it so much that we're terrified it'll make us its prey next. We worry which privileged person is about to move our cheese — or worse, which capriciously convenienced schmuck is going to do so. Always everywhere yet never in one place, change is the perfect summation of our fascination with the possibility of everything and our fear of the certainty of nothing.
BETWEEN TWO FERNS
If you're not a complete loser, you probably know all about Zach Galifianakis's hit web series. Crouched, like so many of us, in a defensive posture of emotional unavailability, the celebrity actor's interview show protects itself, and us, by completely scrambling the distinction between mocking and celebrating our culture's self-consciously amateur awkwardness. Between Two Ferns is "really funny" in the way so much of comedy is today: when there are jokes, they don't make you laugh, and when you laugh, it's not because there are jokes. It's "really cool." President Barack Obama has appeared on it.
Putatively, Between Two Ferns is named Between Two Ferns because the title describes the physical location of Galifianakis and his on-set interview guests. But on a deeper level that Galifianakis may or may not have intended, there's a good reason to frame manufactured awkwardness with ferns. As Adam and Eve can tell you, the first articles of clothing were sewn shamefully from the leaves of bushes. Even today, as our better cartoons attest, when nothing else is there for you, when you find yourself awkwardly naked, you can usually count on a fern to duck behind. Sometimes, you've got ferns to the left of you, ferns to the right, but you're stuck in the middle, unable to dive for shelter.
In addition to being a metaphor for awkwardness, the fern is a great visualization of change. In fact, if you've ever experienced it, you know just how closely awkwardness and change are related. One minute, as Heidi Klum tells the weeping losers on Project Runway, you're on top. The next, you're out. Above all, for us, change means changing status. When our status has suddenly changed for the worse, the last place we want to be caught is between two ferns. We don't want to stand out from the foliage — we want to vanish behind it, the way Homer Simpson, in one of the internet's more meaningful gifs, backs unblinkingly into a hedgerow until he disappears.
Yes, yes, we know: sometimes it seems like the jerks at the top of the social food chain never lose out when awkward change strikes. They were "born on third base," or they "gamed the system," or they slept their way to the top, or hacked their lives, or whatever excuse we prefer to make for their enviably secure prosperity. But we also know how unenviably precarious it really is, especially after just a generation or two. In old Europe, aristocratic families persisted at an unreachable social height for century after century; in America, our mighty routinely fall, and our wealthy go broke, in the space of a generation or two — or less! American craziness makes crackheads out of celebrities, convicted criminals out of leading professionals, and casualties out of heirs and heiresses. "The actual moment completely occupies and absorbs them," says Tocqueville of the rich, the well-positioned, and the rest of us no less. "They are much more in love with success than with glory." The manners of our so-called elites mirror those of the rest of us, "almost always" lagging "behind the rise in their social position. As a result," he says, "very vulgar tastes often go with their enjoyment of extraordinary prosperity, and it would seem that their only object in rising to supreme power was to gratify trivial and coarse appetites more easily." We know that even at the pinnacle, people focus way more on living large than on grandiose schemes, and ruination and humiliation are never completely at bay.
That's why, in the back of our minds, our constant anxiety about change boils down to a weird oxymoron. Turns out being "change's bitch," as we would and Tocqueville wouldn't say, isn't the worst fate. That's being ignored by change, so to speak — being simply irrelevant. There's another gif that's probably still twirling away somewhere in your feed, a knowingly outdated 3Dtext image reading lol nothing matters, rotating brightly and briskly like an old customizable screensaver. Meant to mockingly signify the futility of people's feelings and opinions — possibly to the point of all feelings and opinions — it reflects back the ultimate in awkward loserdom imposed by change. Change? Yeah, no, it's too cool for you. Sorry not sorry! Stay FOMO!
It is not an accident that we talk this way about change on the internet — and increasingly, as I'm doing now, in real life. A keen observer of American life could see this coming a sociohistorical mile away. In fact, Alexis de Tocqueville did see it coming and painstakingly transcribed a soulful account of how and why it would come. His awareness of the way change occurs to us is the reason he wrote Democracy in America. It's the reason why we should care — a lot — that he did. It's the reason you're reading this book.
To uncover the art of being free in all realms of our lives — from religion to money to entertainment, from sex to death to love — we can begin with a simple task: taking account of where we exist in historical time. Tocqueville tells us something we're ready to hear: we're not just living at some random moment in human existence. But he also offers a provocation: we're at a crossroads. Our experience has been prepared for centuries, and how it turns out will impact human beings for centuries to come.
Naturally, that sends us into internal-monologue overdrive. Oh, great. No wonder we're all so crazy.
Yes, but hang on! You can do that, right? Americans are great at hanging on.
Let's forgive ourselves for our hair-trigger sarcasm, whipped out, as so often it is, to channel our frustration at being passive objects into a passionate performance as active subjects. Let's take a moment of Zen to soak into Tocqueville's cosmic vision. Life is pretty disorienting. Many of our worries stem from feeling lost in the shuffle of life. Much of what we argue about is how to orient ourselves in space and time. We find it equally hard to just shrug, on the one hand, as to surrender ourselves over to grandiose, all-consuming missions, on the other. Tocqueville offers us a different path, toward a different horizon. We can prime ourselves to embrace his logic just by considering that his provocation is actually an invitation to become extraordinarily (but not ridiculously) more chill. Then we can allow him to coach us through the realms of life step by step.
Ready? Here we go.
We like to think the present age is radically different and distant from the time of the American Revolution, to say nothing of the Puritans. Even though the uncertainties of contemporary life stress us out, we're more afraid of a world where nothing is new under the sun. For us, novelty is a compliment — of course, as Tocqueville would say. The very first words of his author's introduction confess that "no novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions." The definitive aspect of American society, "the creative element from which each particular fact" about us, in Tocqueville's eyes, "derived," was a novelty! The goodness of novelty is in our bones. For us, you can't turn back the clock, and it often seems not just vain but morally wrong to try.
The truth, says Tocqueville, is more complicated. We're so close to our newness, we often can't see it. Lost in the minutiae of small novelties, we forget that we're still fresh fish in a cosmic sea change that began hundreds of years ago. And, ironically, because the patterns laid down at our American origins are far more persistent than we care to imagine, we're extra prone to downplay how much of the craziness of our lives is rooted in what Tocqueville saw were new patterns established and spread by the people whose origins as new Americans traced to Plymouth Rock.
We're still at the very beginning of humanity's journey out of one era and into another. True, our experience tells us that we're in a world hugely unlike that of our ancestors. But we're also so focused on what's right in front of our noses that we struggle to create a long-term vision of our future. We intuit only dimly "what can be hoped or feared"; with "much curiosity and little leisure," we live out lives "so practical, complicated, agitated, and active" that we have but "little time for thinking" — and little ability to project creative intentionality deep into the future. Too stressed out to master the centuries ahead, we console ourselves by at least feeling free of the past.
Were we less encumbered, we could begin to see just how close we still are in our habits, our feelings, and our mores to American life at its origins. We'd glimpse that the strange new kind of change we're going through now has more in common than we think with the kind of change at work in Tocqueville's time — just as fresh, important, and recognizable as it was back then. It's because Tocqueville has enough of the aristocratic mind-set to lounge around, pondering humanity's long-term future, that he envisions what we, as time travelers dumped in the mid-nineteenth century, could not: our own predicament.
By thinking about who we Americans could still be in this and future centuries, Tocqueville tries to warn our predecessors — and their descendants — how not to descend into social and individual madness. That's why he pays such close attention, in Democracy in America, to the way we live out our collective and personal journeys between past and future. He wraps the book around the idea that we can't make sense of our world except as an experience of change.
Not one for overindulging abstract ideas — a vice we are particularly vulnerable to — Tocqueville takes care to detail what kind of "change experience" defines our perplexing, problematic age. This long moment we entered into a few hundred years ago isn't a nonjudgmental mushball of random alterations. It isn't change for change's sake. But it also isn't change in the way that the ancient Greeks and Romans, right up through Niccolò Machiavelli, imagined: as a cyclical, natural process — fickle in its dispensations of fate, perhaps, but, on a cosmic level, locked in a loop. Instead of hurtling forward on the rapids of history, we rose and fell like empires, seasons, or tides. For Tocqueville, the unprecedented moment he sees dawning in America — the one we're still living in now — is the Great Transition: out of what he calls the "aristocratic" age that had begun to die, into the "democratic" age now coming to life. One era, one world, one way of life is ending forever, and another one, a new one, is coming to replace it. The old, ancient age is not over and done with, mind you. And we assuredly haven't yet disappeared into the new one. Instead, we are beginning a long, strange trip through the slow fade-out of the first and the slow fade-in of the second. No matter how terrifyingly rapid particular big changes feel — whether personal ones, like death and divorce, or social ones, like the rise of robots and Donald Trump and other threatening cheese-movers — the truth is that a larger slowness transcends, unifies, and defines them all. In fact, from that higher perspective our pace may move even more slowly in the future, not less, the "irresistible" outworking of "the most continuous, ancient, and permanent tendency known to history." This strange combination of surface speed and deeper slowness is a hallmark of today's Great Transition.
Our first opportunity to chill, then, has to do with responsibility and speed — two things we stress out about all the (ahem) time. Even at our crucial historical crossroads, the pace of the change that defines us most isn't up to us. It's not our burden. "Just let go," as Tyler Durden would say; "Jesus, take the wheel," as Carrie Underwood would. We long for this kind of release from adaptive responsibility in lots of different, distinctly American ways. Here it is.
* * *
Indeed, says Tocqueville, we are granted access to this release because the tempo of that dominating, defining change is moderate enough not to terrify us. Not everyone was so lucky. As Tocqueville noted, Europe's experience of the Great Transition was traumatically accelerated. Sure enough, its blitzkrieg speed — from the French Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars to the nationalistic revolutions of 1848 to the Franco-Prussian War and the World Wars beyond — made the change from one era to another one big reign of terror. "Carried away by a rapid current," he laments, "we obstinately keep our eyes fixed on the ruins still in sight on the bank, while the stream whirls us backward — facing toward the abyss." However potent that kind of analogy to nature, the terrifying tempo of Europe's transition made change a fearsomely unnatural experience, increasingly manufactured and mechanistic, outside of human proportions and exceeding our capacity to cope. In America, by contrast, the speed of change seems blistering at the level of our petty affairs and competitive scrambles. But that we can even engross ourselves in such economies of small differences is a testament to how peaceably, sanely moderate the pace of our change really is. Instead of a Great Transition marked by endless, escalating, exhausting revolutions, ours is marked out in cosmic measurements that human beings, and human generations, can safely reconcile with their real-life experience.
The more cosmic a perspective on our craziness we key into, the more we can chill in its midst. Tocqueville, more a product of the aristocratic than the democratic age, looked upon the implications of this insight with the kind of awe we always get from beholding sublime vistas. When we think about it, the inexorable progress of the Great Transition is pretty much a given, part of the scenery, like water for fish. But for Tocqueville, it inspired reverent astonishment. "This whole book," he says, "has been written under the impulse of a kind of religious dread"; but while any old aristocrat can feel that way watching millennia-old social arrangements disintegrate in the Old World, Tocqueville focuses on America in the New World, where even the most sweeping kind of change plays out in a charmed idyll when compared to the nightmarish panorama of European change. Tocqueville takes pains to observe that race slavery in America is a unique scourge, portending an uncharacteristic degree of blood and misery. But even that sharpest of inequalities cannot accelerate the tempo of change to Europe's terrifying levels.
Of course, human beings have problems, however fortunate they are, and one of our foremost problems develops naturally out of the otherwise blessedly slow pace of the Great Transformation. The risk that looms over us is not of sudden destruction but, as we say, arrested development. As Britney Spears fans might put it, the representative American is not an aristocrat, not yet a democrat — not in Tocqueville's sense, anyway. There is no surprise that ours is an age of mass awkwardness and socioeconomic teen worship. By Tocqueville's lights, we are the tweens of history, working self-consciously to grow up faster, nervous that we can't pull it off. "They see a multitude of little intermediate obstacles, all of which have to be negotiated slowly, between them and the great object of their ultimate desires. The very anticipation of this prospect tires ambition and discourages it. They therefore discard such distant and doubtful hopes," he says of us, "preferring to seek delights less lofty but easier to reach. No law limits their horizon, but they do so for themselves." No wonder Katy Perry's escapist motivational pop, where we're all fireworks and teenage dreams, is such a moneymaker.
(Continues...)Excerpted from The Art of Being Free by James Poulos. Copyright © 2017 James Poulos. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : St. Martin's Press (January 17, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1250077184
- ISBN-13 : 978-1250077189
- Item Weight : 13.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.77 x 1.17 x 8.54 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,940,623 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,272 in Social Philosophy
- #1,750 in Democracy (Books)
- #2,067 in Political Commentary & Opinion
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

James Poulos creates and advises brands and enterprises around technology, media, and design. He is the founder of RETURN, acquired by Blaze Media, where he is editor-at-large, editorial director of Frontier, and host of Zero Hour.
James is the author of three books: I Know This Sounds Crazy, Human Forever, and The Art of Being Free. With his wife Chandler he is cofounder of the production house Gun Girl Creative. A Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, he holds a Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University.
Previously, James was the cofounder and editor of The American Mind at the Claremont Institute and the founding contributing editor of American Affairs. His prolific and influential work on the dynamics of democracy in the digital age has been widely published for over a decade, from Foreign Affairs and National Affairs to The New York Times and The Washington Post, among many others.
He lives in the desert.
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Customers find the book entertaining. However, the writing style receives mixed reactions, with some praising its style while others find it hard to read. Moreover, the content also gets mixed reviews, with some finding it enlightening while others criticize it for having too many pop culture references.
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Customers find the book entertaining and enjoyable to read.
"...If you find that enjoyable to read, then you're a better person than I - I gave up on it halfway through the book...." Read more
"...It's fun, it's witty and it's sharp." Read more
"Interesting, important, and fun..." Read more
Customers have mixed reactions to the book's content, with some finding it enlightening while others criticize it for having too many pop culture references.
"...The climactic piece of wisdom is delivered very directly, like late-night advice from a drinking buddy. I have to admit to a “that’s it?”..." Read more
"...But before long you are also treated to modern examples and pop culture references that have woven their way into his thoughts -- Marilyn Manson,..." Read more
"Mostly sociological drivel. No worth reading" Read more
"Poulos has a smart and engaging prose-style that kept me in there, even while I was often confused about what he was trying to say...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the writing style of the book, with some praising its style and engaging prose, while others find it hard to read.
"...: he’s incredibly sharp, his perspective is unique and he writes with style...." Read more
"...I was very disappointed. It's basically unreadable - full of sort-of witty turns of phrase that go nowhere, odd pop culture references, and lots of..." Read more
"...'s not an easy line to straddle but James Poulos does it with literary grace and humor, making the weighty ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville accessible..." Read more
"Poulos has a smart and engaging prose-style that kept me in there, even while I was often confused about what he was trying to say...." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2017The Art of Being Free summons up the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville to explain why life in the USA is so crazy, and what we can do about it. “Crazy” in the sense of emotionally unmoored: our tendency as Americans to lurch melodramatically and unpredictably from expansive optimism to paranoid resentment and back again.
Author James Poulos has done a fair bit of unpredictable lurching himself in the dozen or so years since I discovered him. He’s been a blogger, a podcaster, a columnist, a rock band frontman and a novelist. I can’t attest to the novel (still unpublished), but in every other medium he’s excelled: he’s incredibly sharp, his perspective is unique and he writes with style. But whereas other talented cultural observers of his generation have found secure perches--your Chris Hayeses on the Left, your Ross Douthats on the Right--Poulos has remained relatively obscure.
In part this is because his politics are less easily classifiable. He’s vaguely right-of-center, but he’s not like any conservative you’ve ever encountered. His perspective is heavily informed by classic thinkers like Tocqueville, but he’s as apt to find insights in the lyrics of Marilyn Manson. In a culture that prizes bald declarations, he goes for the elliptical and elusive. Let others rush in with the “hot takes”; Poulos is the guy who watches the scene with a quizzical half-smile and then, when the crowd has dispersed, makes some throwaway comment that seems nonsensical at first, but recurs to you with the force of revelation later that night.
All of which is to say that if you’re hoping to find a straightforward instruction manual in The Art of Being Free, you’re bound to be disappointed. The value of the book lies more in the journey than the destination: the unlikely connections, the unexpected syntheses, the “I never thought of it that way” moments. In the range of his enthusiasms, in the glee with which he pulls high culture into conversation with pop culture, he reminds me of Camille Paglia. Like her, he gives off a “cool teacher” vibe, though his style and concerns are quite different. I found myself scribbling notes in the margins, and I’m not a margin scribbler.
Poulos sets expectations early: his aim is not to pinpoint a cure for the craziness of contemporary American life--that’s an impossible ask. Rather, he aims (with the help of Tocqueville) to describe a technique for surfing the craziness, for remaining sane and properly enjoying the very real advantages of Liberty, American Style. When the author arrives at this final movement of his symphony, he mostly drops the scholarly allusions and shifts to a more intimate, even confessional register. The climactic piece of wisdom is delivered very directly, like late-night advice from a drinking buddy. I have to admit to a “that’s it?” reaction: after the elaborate build-up, the payoff almost comes across as an afterthought. But I am still thinking about it a week later, which is more than I can say about most books.
Now when are we going to get to read the novel?
- Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2017Mostly sociological drivel. No worth reading
- Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2017The Art of Being Free exists somewhere on the spectrum between self-help tome and intellectual dissertation. It's not an easy line to straddle but James Poulos does it with literary grace and humor, making the weighty ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville accessible and relevant even if you've never read Democracy in America (though you should!). Thankfully, he's not afraid to challenge the reader either -- you are warned up front that Poulos will not pander. But before long you are also treated to modern examples and pop culture references that have woven their way into his thoughts -- Marilyn Manson, Beck and an acknowledgment that the world we live in is one that seeks practical guides for navigating our philosophical challenges. Poulos is the rare breed who can hold court on the day's events while effortlessly putting things into a larger context of historical meaning -- all before strapping on a guitar and conveying meaning in an entirely different medium with his Los Angeles-based band.
The ideas Poulos grapples with are timeless but especially relevant in 2017 as America, and the world, are forced to ponder exactly what democracy means at large and at home in ways we haven't truly been made to think for decades. Obviously no book is for everyone, but if you're interested in the larger issues that drive our daily search for meaning and purpose, The Art of Being Free is a wonderful place to start.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2017I really wanted to like this book! I heard James Poulos on two of my favorite podcasts, The Conservatarians and The Federalist Radio Hour, and in both he was engaging, enlightening, and entertaining. So I ordered The Art Of Being Free from Amazon and sat down to read it with great anticipation. I was very disappointed. It's basically unreadable - full of sort-of witty turns of phrase that go nowhere, odd pop culture references, and lots of meandering sentences stuffed with sociologese that make it near-impossible to follow his argument. Here's a sample taken at random:
"With the mutability money confers comes commensurability. The more things change, the more things interchange. Money allows us to change like it does by allowing us to exchange - to "reconnect" (as we say) with our unity by participating in a kind of interchangeability that carries, however fleetingly, a sense of import. Our experiences of significant interchange are an inspiring bulwark against the dispiriting experience of our interchangeable insignificance. Without the commensurability of goods and services - in principle, any and all goods and services - access to that experience is imperiled or lost." (p. 132)
If you find that enjoyable to read, then you're a better person than I - I gave up on it halfway through the book. Maybe I'm dense, but I do know that I love the writing of G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Sowell, and Neil Postman. All of them write about social, economic, technological, and cultural issues in ways that can have a profound impact on the reader, while remaining accessible.
Based on Mr. Poulos' warm and thoughtful conversations I heard on the podcasts, he has a great book in him. Unfortunately, this one isn't it.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2017Poulos has a smart and engaging prose-style that kept me in there, even while I was often confused about what he was trying to say. The book is full of deep feeling about profound issues, and I admire the effort. The feelings remain but his ideas are elusive.
Top reviews from other countries
- trevor shelleyReviewed in Canada on November 14, 2017
5.0 out of 5 stars For those who both do and don’t know Tocqueville, ...
For those who both do and don’t know Tocqueville, this is a clear, witty, and insightful work.
Arrived on time, thanks.