Review In First Principles

At ISI’s web journal, First Principles, my review of John Lukacs’ George Kennan is available online.  Here is an excerpt:

There was not for Kennan the rude identification with the broad mass of the people that Lukacs marks as the defining trait of nationalism, but rather the tie to country and land that was for him most significant in determining his loyalties and strong sense of duty. This distance from “the people” seems to have been in one sense temperamental—Kennan was not a man who relished crowds—and in another sense philosophical and political. Coming of age in the 1920s and ’30s, Kennan developed a “distaste for democracy,” and his convictions during this period “involved a critique of parliamentarism and democracy.” In retrospect, some of his enthusiasms for authoritarian and corporatist regimes, whether of Austria or Portugal, may seem misplaced, but if ever there were a time when popular government revealed itself in all its weaknesses, fecklessness, and potential for degeneration it was probably during these decades. Certainly in our own time we could stand to have more Kennanesque skepticism of the virtues of democracy and less unchecked enthusiasm for its wonder-working powers.