Timothy Sandefur's Articles
History, Politics & Rights, Reviews
The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840 by Akhil Reed Amar
Timothy Sandefur June 2, 2021
Americans need a book that will help them better understand the values underlying our early constitutional history—and they need an authoritative and compelling intellectual voice to explain and vindicate the nation’s fundamental law. Sad to say, they will not find those here.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
Ibsen’s Kingdom: The Man and His Works by Evert Sprinchorn
Timothy Sandefur May 14, 2021
“One of the most extraordinary features of Ibsen’s works,” Sprinchorn writes, is the way “each play grows out of its predecessor.” By examining them in order, he draws out their weightier elements, combining an acute understanding of theater and a thorough grasp of the political, social, and artistic controversies that set the background for Ibsen’s career.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand
Timothy Sandefur April 13, 2021
Louis Menand is a writer of great gifts, whose 2000 book The Metaphysical Club is a masterpiece of intellectual history. Unfortunately, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War fails to recapture the magic. That’s partly because despite its bulk—880 pages—it’s curiously incomplete.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
Sophocles: Oedipus the King, A New Verse Translation by David Kovacs
Timothy Sandefur March 2, 2021
Oedipus the King has been considered a masterpiece for two and a half millennia. No less a luminary than Aristotle called it the ideal tragedy. But today’s readers are often disturbed by its apparent injustice. How is it fair that the gods consign Oedipus—a genuine hero who strives to avoid committing the sins for which he is damned—to such an awful fate?
History, Politics & Rights, Reviews
A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution by Damon Root
Timothy Sandefur February 9, 2021
Root’s book provides a thoroughly researched and readable introduction to the arguments that formed the basis of what has rightly been called the “refounding” of the United States a century and a half ago—and that remain relevant today.
History, Philosophy, Politics & Rights, Reviews
Freedom: An Unruly History by Annelien de Dijn
Timothy Sandefur January 14, 2021
Far from a history of liberty, de Dijn’s book is a conscious effort to undermine that concept and to substitute in its place what she calls a “democratic conception of freedom,” which, in principle, amounts to collective control over every aspect of individual behavior.
Politics & Rights, Reviews
The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits
Timothy Sandefur December 18, 2020
Markovits’s reliance on loaded language is a good sign that his argument cannot stand—pardon the pun—on its own merits.
Politics & Rights, Reviews
The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind by Bart J. Wilson
Timothy Sandefur November 4, 2020
The Property Species suggests fruitful speculations to demonstrate that property is a truly universal manifestation of human rationality and of man’s needs, not only to survive, but also thrive.
Arts & Culture, History, Philosophy, Politics & Rights, Reviews
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
Timothy Sandefur October 2, 2020
In Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explore the connections between such phenomena as “shoutdowns,” “canceling,” and identity politics on the one hand and the philosophical doctrines taught in America’s universities on the other.
Arts & Culture, Biographies, History
John Singer Sargent and the Art of Elegance
Timothy Sandefur August 20, 2020
More than any of his contemporaries, Sargent expressed the glamour that emerging capitalism made possible. Yet that is just what made him incomprehensible or unacceptable to later artists and critics.
Arts & Culture, History
Zora Neale Hurston, Undefeated
Timothy Sandefur February 20, 2020
Often scorned and rejected in her own day, Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneering writer who looked beyond the controversies of her time and sought to articulate a lasting vision of life—one free of bitterness or pettiness and full of grace and beauty.
Arts & Culture
Dorothy Fontana Was ‘a Damn Good Writer’
Timothy Sandefur December 6, 2019
Dorothy Fontana, who died this week at the age of eighty, is best known for her work as a writer for the original Star Trek television series. But, in fact, she was one of the most remarkable women in Hollywood history.
History, Philosophy, Politics & Rights
Leading an Enlightenment Life in an Anti-Enlightenment World
Timothy Sandefur November 21, 2019
Exemplars of Enlightenment thinking, Deborah Feldman, Yeonmi Park, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali escaped oppression in pursuit of freedom, rational inquiry, and the life these values make possible. They are models for us all.
Economics, History, Politics & Rights
The Bravery of Hong Kong’s Freedom Fighters
Timothy Sandefur November 21, 2019
The bravery of today’s Hong Kong protestors is nothing short of incredible. Confronting the massive forces of the world’s largest and most bloodstained dictatorship, they stand for freedom against overwhelming odds. Yet they remain undaunted.
Arts & Culture
Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Important Things in Life
Timothy Sandefur November 7, 2019
Stevie Ray Vaughan left lasting monuments to his musical genius—and a lesson about the importance of focusing on the important things in life.