John Simpson of the BBC has suggested that the year 2025 might rank as a water-shed year, as 1989 and 1968 were, because of the way Donald Trump has been shredding global norms. It certainly is looking like that two months into 2025. Two of our book reviews are directed related to this revolution in world politics: Robert Lighthizer’s No Trade is Free and Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk. However our reviews looking at the Russian Orthodox Church and its relationship with the State, as well as F. Russell Hittinger’s look at State over-reach are also of indirect relevance to the current over-turning of socio-political norms.
The topic of State over-reach is, to my mind at least, a topic which is both eminently important and eminently overlooked. F. Russell Hittinger’s On the Dignity of Society addresses this issue from the point of view of Catholic Social Teaching. At home I think we see a small but sad example of State over-reach in proposed Dublin bye-laws that could stop volunteers from serving food to those in need on the city’s streets.
The “unicorn” of free-trade is tackled in Robert Lighthizer’s No Trade is Free, a book which makes the surprising connection between the much vaunted free-trade of a globalised world and the decline of the social fabric in Middle America – consequent on the loss of “honest work” and “honest wages”.
Lucy Ash’s The Baton and the Cross looks at the vexed question of Church-State relations in Russia – an account which makes one grateful for the degree to which Roman Catholicism has taken Our Lord’s “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar, and unto God what is God’s” (Mt.22.21) seriously.
We also carry a review of Elias Carr’s introduction to the work of René Girard, I Came to Cast Fire. The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel seems to have foreseen how Girard’s abstract mimetic theory would play out in practice (with a vengeance we might say) on Facebook, leading Thiel to make a very lucrative investment in the fledgling venture.
Finally we look at the man who must be one of the most fascinating, if not puzzling, figures on the contemporary world stage: Elon Musk, as seen through the eyes of Walter Isaacson. Musk’s career to date has been the stuff of science fiction, but by all appearances Isaacson will need to be taking notes for a follow up volume which promises to be stranger still.