Populism on a Human Scale

[Draggingtree]

Populism on a Human Scale

 

Politics on a Human Scale: The American Tradition of Decentralism,

 

Jeff Taylor, Lexington Books, 648 pages

By PETER HAWORTH AND JOSHUA BOWMAN • October 23, 2015

Deserting the old idol / Dalrymple. LC-DIG-ppmsca-28610 (digital file from original print)

Jeff Taylor’s timely and provocative work, Politics on a Human Scale, deserves to be read as carefully as it was written. Informed by his own Jeffersonian populism, Taylor articulates a vision of the decentralist imagination in American history. By selectively rereading American political development since the founding, he recovers a distinctively populist tradition that challenges the centralizing tendencies of internationalist elites in politics and big business.

 

Taylor’s work takes its place alongside other advocates of such an approach, including Wendell Berry, Allan Carlson, Patrick Deneen, Jason Peters, and Rod Dreher. But while the individual essays demonstrate Taylor’s many virtues, a wider reading of history presents considerable, if not insurmountable, challenges to his faith in populism.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/populism-on-a-human-scale/