Will Hutton is passionate, diligent and humane. His ability to articulate contemporary anxieties borders on genius. Yet hardly anyone engaged in making policy takes him seriously. He is an intellectual celebrity crying in the wilderness.
Hutton’s exaggerations as a polemicist have long undermined his credibility as an analyst. This book is no exception. But it does contain nuggets of truth. It is also well-timed. The bursting of the US stock market bubble should help his efforts to vindicate what he thinks of as European civilisation against its overweening American rival. It may even bring closer his goal of persuading his country that its destiny lies in the embrace of its European neighbours and the disavowal of its selfish American progeny.
The US, says Hutton, is in the grip of a malevolent creed that he calls conservatism. The heart of this creed is a belief-natural for immigrants in an almost empty continent-in the rights of private property. For Americans, “the purpose of society was to further the enjoyment of property and political power was only legitimate if it served this end.”
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