The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life

by Kenneth Minogue

One of the grim comedies of the twentieth century was the fate of miserable victims of communist regimes who climbed walls, swam rivers, dodged bullets, and found other desperate ways to achieve liberty in the West at the same time as intellectuals in the West sentimentally proclaimed that these very regimes were the wave of the future. A similar tragicomedy is being played out in our century: as the victims of despotism and backwardness from third world nations pour into Western states, the same ivory tower intellectuals assert that Western life is a nightmare of inequality and oppression.

In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia’s love affair with social perfection and reveals how that idealistic dream is destroying exactly what has made the inventive Western world irresistible to the peoples of foreign lands. The Servile Mind looks at how Western morality has evolved into mere “politico-moral” posturing about admired ethical causes—from solving world poverty and creating peace to curing climate change. Today, merely making the correct noises and parading one’s essential decency by having the correct opinions has became a substitute for individual moral actions.

Instead, Minogue posits, we ask that our government carry the burden of solving our social—and especially moral—problems for us. The sad and frightening irony is that as we allow the state to determine our moral order and inner convictions, the more we need to be told how to behave and what to think.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Psychology, History

384 pages, Hardcover

First published July 13, 2010

About the author

Political theorist who was Emeritus Professor of Political Science and Honorary Fellow at the London School of Economics.

Reviews

[Tristram Shandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not to Everybody’s Liking

The Servile Mind. How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life – the very title, at least its second part, will at first sight probably put off readers who are convinced of the blessings of modern democracy. Ironically, though, Kenneth Minogue’s last book is anything but a rejection of democracy and the freedom promised by this form of government; quite on the contrary, Minogue tries to alert his readers to the loss of liberty in the wake of modern western governments’ efforts to realize the project of a “Brave New World” in which inequality, frustration of needs both social and material, and hierarchy will be overcome on no less than a world-wide scale.

Let’s try to put Minogue’s line of thought in a nutshell: According to him, European culture is unique, one of a kind, in that its members developed a deep-rooted sense of individualism and moral life because their thoughts and actions were neither exclusively shaped and influenced by tradition nor by religion. Instead, a keen moral awareness required them to model their actions on their own moral decisions, thus following their private interests but also trying to consider what is “right” and what is “wrong” in moral terms, which could well conflict with religious doctrine or tradition. These individualists conceived of government as an institution that upholds the rule of law as a way of forestalling the violation of any citizen’s liberties by another citizen, and they furthermore conceived these liberties as resulting in responsibility for the individual using them with a view to the individual’s fellow-citizens. Life was thus regarded as a competition, but also as a game which offers its losers new opportunities in other fields of action. Responsibility also obliged every individual to face the results of their own actions and decisions, and vices or egoistic behaviour would also eventually bring their own retributive consequences with them. This peculiar mindset enabled “Europeans” to face new challenges and adapt to changes, thus granting European culture a certain longevity and accounting for its success.

From the 19th century on, however, larger parts of the population came to voice their grievances, and in the wake of Marxism and liberalism, the abolition of these grievances – and still later, of grievances as such – became the order of the day. People started thinking in terms of rights rather than liberties, cherishing the feeling of entitlement to equality, ranging from legal to social, gender, or sexual equality, and instead of regarding the state as an institution that provides laws as a means of regulating citizens’ using their liberties in a strife of interests, they started to understand the government as a source of enforcing egalitarianism. Individual failure and resorting to crime were no longer regarded as personal faults but held against society, whose injustices just made people behave dysfunctionally, and the cult of the victim was born. The government’s major task in this conception is no less but the project to create a perfect society and to abolish what egalitarians think of as injustices, often by re-distributing resources from one group of the population to other groups, i.e. by spending other people’s (tax) money, and by expanding state regulations into areas that were heretofore the private business of citizens, e.g. by introducing quotas into executive suites. Minogue sees two dangers in this development, which are in a way two sides of the same coin: On the one hand, governments become more and more powerful, since their claim to establish a better society implies that there is always one correct answer to any given moral problem enhances them to the position of keepers of the moral Grail – moral questions thus becoming ethical codes of behaviour – and entitling them to improve their citizens, e.g. by prescribing politically correct parlances, attitudes and even feelings and by setting up ethical role models, i.e. by degrading moral deliberation to imitative behaviour. On the other hand, citizens, who used to be self-reliant and mentally independent, are becoming more and more servile as they enjoy the benefits showered upon them by a seemingly benevolent government, and they learn to make the right noises and transfer all their loyalty to a state which allows them a carefree, hedonistic existence within the limits set by the conception of what is ethical.

This is basically the development Minogue claims to have diagnosed by looking at what he calls the politico-moral culture of our time. Whereas one may have certain reservations as to what seems to be neo-liberal malarkey in his argument, most of his warnings seem to be all too appropriate. Reading his book repeatedly made me think of George Orwell’s concept of Thoughtcrime, which he developed in his novel 1948. Just consider the hype that is made in connection with the so-called anthropogenic climate change. The basic, unspoken assumption made by environmental romanticists everywhere is that climate, as everything in nature, is a stable and evenly balanced benevolent system, and that change must needs be bad, and as such a result of man’s interference with nature. Any ever so sober attempt to put into question the tenet of anthropogenic climate change is condemned as an ill-willed and sinister move of some capitalist few to obscure responsibilities; one of the most ludicrous examples of this tendency can be seen in an Australian music professor seriously demanding the death penalty for those who openly doubt anthropogenic climate change.

So even if readers may entertain some caveats against certain neo-liberal tendencies in Minogue’s thoughts, or if they may not agree with some of his ideas [1], they might well be inclined to share his concerns about the ongoing change in political culture, in which a class of know-it-all self-styled humanitarians hijacked interpretive authority in moral questions and made their ideals the projects of western societies at the cost of political controversy and citizens’ rights to pursue their own interests.

It may be argued that Minogue would have been able to avoid repeating some of his ideas so and so many times and that he could also have abstained from the scathing irony with which he describes the motives and ideals of those he wants to criticize but then you can also take his sarcasm and his tendency to repeat himself as signs of his own commitment. All in all his style is much more pleasant to read than the pseudo-objective politico-moral droning-on of the myrmidons of political correctness.

Therefore, I think this book is in some ways an eye-opener even though you may not really agree with everything Minogue says.

[1] Let me give you two examples in which I would not agree with Minogue, or would rather qualify his statements. When it comes to raising and educating children, for instance, Minogue complains that the common tendency to distrust and ridicule authorities made it more difficult for teachers to achieve their aims. Minogue feels that abolishing the use of the cane also took the spine out of a teacher’s authority. Here I’d say that what he convincingly refers to as auctoritas should never be rooted in physical violence but in a teacher’s knowledge on his subject, in his fairness and in his ability to pass on some of his enthusiasm to his students. It is surely deplorable that governments tend to meddle more and more with what should rather be private matters within families but when it comes to outlawing physical punishment and other abuses I would welcome any law going into that direction because children can be talked to.

Minogue also criticizes the tendency of western national governments to abandon more and more of their power to supernatural organizations like the EU and to NGOs, and while I fully agree with him that there is a danger of eroding democracy in this by transferring power to bureaucracies and institutions lacking explicit democratic legitimization, I would still think that Minogue’s Hobbesian concept of a bellum omnia contra omnes on the international level is a state of affairs that ought not to be taken completely for granted.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kenneth Minogue died the day after I finished this book. (Beware, Tom Wolfe, I just started your latest novel.) I know very little about the man, but if The Servile Mind is any indication, he was very perceptive, learned, and well-versed in human nature and political philosophy.

The book is in large part a critique of the ideological prejudices of our times, an ideology Minogue labels the politico-moral. But Minogue is not simply joining in our political and culture wars. Like the ancients, Minogue is concerned with the kind of person our regimes, our politics, are creating.

The politico-moral resembles other utopian, materialist socialisms of the last century only it eschews the disastrous totalitarian forms of that century. Minogue attempts to observe the workings of democracy over the last two centuries and explain what democracy has wrought much as Tocqueville did in the 19th century. Democratic political institutions he explains have given way to a democratic ideal, a radical egalitarianism, the moral principle toward which our politics strives with little account for competing ends. This egalitarianism has taken the form of the welfare state that exists to distribute wealth in an attempt to eliminate any social and material discomfort. Further, these goals are not limited to individual nation-states, but have been internationalized in the form of governing organizations such as the European Union and non-governmental organizations seeking to spread the wealth and influence of the West into poorer parts of the world. Minogue sees a turn toward what he calls governance away from the rule of law in the West such that pursuit of this democratic ideal has undermined actual democratic political institutions. States are increasingly regulating much of their citizens’ lives and also giving sovereignty over to international organizations. Citizens have less and less influence over their governors and have given over much of their freedom for the security of the welfare state.

The result, Minogue warns, is a servile people. Previously, the West was characterized by a philosophy of individualism. The state existed to provide a stable set of rules under which citizens were free to pursue their own ends and happiness. This resulted in several centuries, reaching back to its roots in the Middle Ages, of cultural flourishing and unprecedented economic prosperity due to free markets. There was a vast social space uninhabited by the state in which people and social institutions grew and interacted. This freedom and concomitant responsibility fostered independent minds and rewarded a mixture of virtues and vices including courage, risk-taking, and discipline. People were self-governing not just in the political sense but literally, over all aspects of their lives, making myriad moral choices. Conversely, the politico-moral state undermines material independence and independence of mind by crowding out this moral space. People, Minogue observes, in the politico-moral world are collectively obedient and individually hedonistic. The only moral action is that of compliance with the ever-metastasizing regulatory state. The citizen is required only to be compliant and have politically correct attitudes. He is otherwise left to indulge in his impulses, the consequences of which he has been relieved by the state. Minogue adeptly demonstrates that the politico-moral actually creates the shrunken, atomized, materialist peoples its proponents wrongly fear free states and markets produce.

Ultimately, the politico-moral functions on the historically arrogant presumption that we have come to understand at last the moral principle on which society should rest for all peoples at all times, this egalitarianism Minogue describes. Minogue's book is a welcome, Burkean caution against the direction of the West's politics.

[Buciu Petre · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book for the times to come. The renowned professor of political philosophy Kenneth Minogue has provided a very insightful account of the underlaying changes in the moral paradigms of the Western social life in the last decades and he is concerned with a set of ideologies, founded on very simplistic and narrow premises, which he labeled „politico-moral”. They pretty much resemble the socialist and other radical universalistic doctrines of the last two centuries and, rather than dragging the whole modern West into brutal totalitarianism - as in much of the part of twentieth century -they seem to slowly erode the moral life of western citizens, culminating in important changes in moral attitudes that make the individualism of the past unlikely to survive.

The politico-moral is, virtually, the project for the radical betterment of the whole world, through massive collective action of a society guided from ”above”. It is usually concerted in accordance with the latest trends in what political elites happen to entertain about various things such as „justice” (which becomes „social justice”), „advantage”, „privilege”, and other targets like abolishing war, eradicating poverty. Such actions are dealt with through governments and the money needed, provided usually through taxation.

The problem with such vast enterprises which involve the whole society is that it seems to make some very bizarre demands of its citizens. In the name of social justice and other such projects for equalizing the world, people are required to abhore their former loyalties, local and ”narrow” as they are. Some intellectuals complain that it is unjust to send your child to the best school, ministers have taught people what stories to read them, others suggest that our habits are unhealthy and need to be changed, or that the racial distribution of our friends do not quite match the standards that these people may impose on us.

The narrative is that all these things will lead to ”unjust” outcomes and future inequalities. It is fair enough, for a world left on its own will never be a perfect world. It would have been so by now, if it were the case. What this imply, however, is that the perfect world of the politico-moral is not a world that may value freedom and moral autonomy. And so it must overcome these value and the „power structures” that sustain them: religion, traditions, basic tenets of classical liberalism, all being labeled as ”selfish” ways of life and divisive in their own nature. And in this way Mr. Minogue explain the appearance of a new and strange type of moral life: the singleton.

In his commitments to the the projects of politico-moral, the singleton sees local attachments and loyalties as ”prejudiced” and ”bigoted”. Such people put their trust in the international political and legal body, far from the democratic pressure and from the national state, which is suspected to have ”narrow” interests. Such people confuse liberations with freedom, agitate themselves in virtue of some „noble” causes and seem to care much for the plight and suffering of abstract classes of people. In other words, progressivism (or politico-moral) is a demanding religion, and its God - the (international) State, is a zealous God, if I may put it so.

Politico-moral is, certainly, full of good intention on the surface. Yet, in the long term it is likely to be a very dangerous threat at the very foundations of European civilization, killing the very dynamism and ambivalence in the moral life of earlier times that made it so great. Minogue argues that this is precisely what distinguished European civilization from virtually all the others: a kind of ambivalence in our conduct and moral opinions, a duality which he traces back in the Christian religion's separation of the secular and divine realms. All the others civilizations depend on some kind of ”right” single order which is to be imposed by the religious customs or despots.

Politico-moral, he argues, is in some kinds a return to the conduct of traditional non-western societies, with their emphasis on the single ”correct” perspective that is to be imposed on us and on whose grounds we are to be judged as good or villains. It makes vast and grand declarations of „rights” that are to be exported all over the world, a kind a moral imperialism certainly at odds with the openness and tolerance and cultural relativism promoted by its exponents. (well, arguably, this is beginning to change in our multicultural societies - not at all a good thing).

Of course, this is a highly nuanced and profound book and I inevitably made many simplification in its central arguments for the sake of brevity. It should not be judged but on its own terms and words. Finally, I think it is a book that really deserves to be widely read and remembered. Those who scorn the past will learn some interesting facts from this book which are likely to change their limited and arrogant views. It makes some interesting arguments you are not likely to encounter in the general „marketplace” of today's ideas. This book is more than a recycled collection of tired arguments you typically see on conservative media and think tanks.

[Harry Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

He's not wrong, he's just boring

[Nick Imrie]

This book looked so interesting, judging by the back cover, so I'm rather annoyed with myself that I bounced right off it. The opening section contained so many sneering charicatures of left-wing thinking that I couldn't bear it. Probably partly because I'd just finished Scruton's How to Be a Conservative which is so very thoughtful and generous to the opposition.

Maybe I will try again later, but for now it must go back to the library.

[Claudio Rodrigues · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess that when I started reading this book I thought it was a "rant trip". Being a skeptical about Democracy in modern states myself, I thought it was a good book to make me understand better the issues with Democracy. But this book went way beyond what I expected. The author makes a very solid case against Democracy as practiced by modern states and how it destroys the Individualism that was the engine of Western civilization. Reading this book in these Pandemic times, with many states going borderline tyranny, only made it more interesting.

[Valerio Amanti · Rating 1 out of 5]

Un pamphlet lungo 350 pagine diventa inevitabilmente molto noioso e ripetitivo. questo spiega perché ci ho impiegato tanti mesi per leggerlo, ma il problema vero è che non è mai così chiaro che cosa voglia trasmettere l'autore. Molta critica, con alcuni guizzi davvero intelligenti, ma molto poca propositiva e molto poco chiara.

[Donna Anoskey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent ideas though a somewhat tedious read in sections.

[Kåre · Rating 4 out of 5]

En undersøgelse af hvordan demokratiet funger og hvilken moralsk ret, det påberåber sig og kan siges at have eller ikke have.
Det er godt og sobert udført, men føles alligevel lidt ad-hoc agtigt på den måde, at der er mange delelementer i argumentationen, som måske ikke altid hænger helt sammen. Det er måske også lidt uklart, hvor tingene starter og stopper. Men mange fine kritiske betragtninger over demokratiet i vores tid. Meget om demokrati som en slags fordelingsnøgle. Den implicitte antagelse er, at demokratiet fordeler ting og sager, som ikke er dets egne. Helt sikkert er det, at demokratiet kunne fordele anderledes. Det er det, som kampene i demokratiet meget kommer til at handle om, ifølge denne bog.

[Andy C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you, Kenneth. You have contributed some gems to my thinking about the modern world, and I can ask nothing more of an author.

If you are interested in deep thoughts about our modern politics and morals, including the spiritual world in the West, you will enjoy this book.

Minor point, I found the title slightly misleading. I did not find the title to be the main focus, but having said that, it was a good read.

[Russ Weimer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am always amazed at the willingness for people to risk everything to start over in America by leaving states that are supposedly paradises of equality and compare that with native born Americans that denigrate America (but are not on the first plane to leave America). The author does an excellent job of explaining the motivations and consequences of the latter mindset.

[Aaron Crofut · Rating 4 out of 5]

A misnamed book; perhaps a better title would be "The Misguided Mind: How the Drive For Equality Erodes the Moral Life."

A tough book to rate. Minogue tries to unwind the Gordian Knot of "social justice" in terms of both its philosophy and its impact. Social justice is not straight forward, and probably cannot be. He is able to boil it down to the basics: unless the world is perfectly equal, some people will have done better while others have done worse. People do not earn their positions in life (that would make them responsible if they did poorly, and nobody wants to be responsible for that). Instead, we are the products of our social climate. Those born into a materially better world are responsible for saving the rest, rather than the rest being responsible for changing themselves.

The book meanders from critiques of this philosophy, explanations of how Western Civilization was actually able to achieve its height through individualism, and random tangents that are incredibly interesting but renders the book a blurry idea rather than a focused topic. There is a rich streak of interesting ideas in this book, however, and well worth the effort to find. Some worth mentioning:

Democracy as a process vs. Democracy as a teleological end (these two are incompatible).

Desire (a reasoned out want) vs Impulse (an unreasoned want)

The role social rank, manners, and restraints play in curbing our impulses, whereas the "liberation" often associated with Social Justice leads to impulse.

The Christian origin of individual freedom: the first clear distinction of separating Church and State comes from Jesus' famous "God and Caesar" phrase.

The relative lack of corruption in Western states, in particular at the lower levels of government.

The distinction between the moral (what concerns us) and the political (what concerns us all) and how Social Justice means to tear down that separation.

The notion of rights: rules of the game (Classical Liberal) vs. defined benefits (Social Justice).

The emptiness of the term "poverty" (it is defined to always exist, providing an eternal cause to fight and an eternal source of disagreement).

The role the rule of law plays in individualism, requiring compliance, whereas collective regimes use custom that requires obedience. The former is far less restricting than the latter and allows for greater growth in all areas of human life.

He dispenses, as others have, the rather ridiculous notion that capitalism is based solely on personal aggrandizement of physical goods and that it leads to atomization or alienation from each other, when in fact capitalism is based entirely on interactions between people, creating cultures and associations.

The unintended consequences of liberation.


Again, this book lacks a laser focus that a more polemic writer might have and which helps the reader know exactly what is going on. It wanders from interesting topic to interesting topic, and often back again. But it was interesting, and enlightening. That's enough for me to recommend it to others.

[Paul Sand · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

One of those "I wish I was smarter, to understand it better" books. But it's also one of those "I wish it was better" books. I believe I put this on the TBR pile a few years back, perhaps due to this National Review review. Or maybe this one at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The latter calls the book "clear and incisive". I disagree: I thought it was turgid, rambling, and a tad cranky. I'm willing to believe that I'm wrong, though. In any case, thanks be to the Interlibrary Loan folks at the library at the University Near Here for arranging a copy be shipped up from Boston U.

The author, Kenneth Minogue, died in 2013. This 2010 book was his last. (He was in his 80s, so perhaps I was uncharitable about deeming him cranky—once you hit 80, you're entitled to be as cranky as you want.)

Minogue's argument is not so much with "democracy" per se as implied by the book's subtitle. Instead it's a subtler argument about the Western democratic states falling into a "politico-moral" mindset. Governments have moved away from viewing themselves as protectors of individual freedoms, and toward implementing a moral crusade for social justice. At first glance, this is admirable: Minogue admits that the movement, in its opposition to poverty, bigotry, war, ignorance, and oppression, occupies the "moral high ground".

But the cost is high: when individuals under such states are enlisted in these crusades, their own personal projects are deprioritized. Shifts in language encourage individuals to take less responsibility for their own lives—why should you, when the state's project is to view you as (potential) oppressed victim in need of rescue? Hence, "democracy" becomes not a servant of the sovereign people, but the (hopefully benign) master of a servile collective.

I don't want to be overly critical: the book has valuable insights and pithy observations scattered throughout. (Longtime fans of National Review will welcome his discussion, around page 268, of Eric Voegelin's concept of "immanentizing the eschaton".)

But, on the other hand, Minogue's style can throw up speed bumps to understanding his argument. For example, around page 70, we have his description of Lockean rights: they "express a ludic conception of how people live". At which point I needed to hustle to the Google to find out what "ludic" meant. And as it turned out, the word didn't add that much to the discussion.

[Colm Gillis · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exercise in schizophrenic writing which is often illogical, unempirical, but which at the same time contains flashes of genius. I read this book after reading another book of Minogue's called 'The Liberal Mind.' That was far more tightly argued than this book. The 'Servile Mind' is essentially about how the classical Western tradition of moral choice is continually being eroded by the encroachment of the State, a diminishing of moral responsibility, and by a dialogue which makes exaggerated claims about the historical 'criminality' of the West. It is probably the sort of book a reader of the Daily Mail or Sunday Times (or the Conservative party) would take great pleasure in. Reading it, you go through patches where you really can relate to what Minogue is saying. He is in control of his subject. What then lets the book down is the sweeping historical statements, the juxtaposition of the West and the non-West (this appears to be a Cold War hangover where Minogue views every non-Western society as basically Communist), many assertions which are basically wrong, and a whitewashing of the less salubrious aspects of both the West and Western history. As an example, Minogue says that corruption is far less in the West than in the non-West, his point being that an individualist society functions better than a collectivist one in moral terms. While this is a fact, he doesn't draw the real conclusion from this which is that civil servants are paid as well as their counterparts in the private sector to a far greater degree than those in many non-Western countries. Therefore it is a false comparison for obvious reasons. Minogue also seems to make the Islamic world into a new Communist threat. For instance, he says Muslim countries are 'dysfunctional,' which isn't really true when you consider that family structures and traditional mores (values whose decline Minogue continually laments in the West) are not at all dysfunctional. Muslim countries simply have less wealth than Western countries and their members emigrate to the West for almost exclusively financial reasons, and thus are in the same boat as Irish and Italian immigrants to the US 100 years ago, as opposed to asylum seekers from Cuba or East Germany. Minogue also casually dismisses the colonialism of countries in Africa and Asia and the war games that took place there during the Cold War and even after where mineral resources were siphoned off. Instead he merely goes to his default positions, which is that the UK and other countries live in a moral state of superiority. As I said, the book has many merits and Minogue does have a handle of many topics. Parts of the book I really enjoyed. The very stark contrasts that Minogue tended to draw however made him appear amateurish.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As much as I agree with the thesis of the volume: that the monistic striving of many in the West for societal perfection actually harms morality by turning everyone into "singletons" growing more comfortable with an overbearing government, I wish the author would organize his thoughts a bit more effectively. Too many times I get lost in his long, meandering paragraphs, and despite their profundity, they can ramble for a while before getting to the point. Sometimes rambling can be good, like Allan Bloom does in his similarly titled opus. Minogue in his critique of the modern world has held up a mirror to my own life when he describes the "singleton" lifestyle:

The singleton, then, may be understood as an ideal type, as a kind of social atom in which these two elements, work and happiness, the week and the weekend as it were, are fused together into a way of life. And these units are atoms in the sense that their drive in life is often to avoid having what they take to be their freedom compromised by undertaking powerful commitments.

Although much of this may like sound like some old man wagging his finger at the younger generation and wishing for the "good old days," Minogue recognizes that "the discontents of today could not be solved by returning to the discontents of yesterday. Every time conventions erode, new impulses and demands are released." He understands each new generation has its challenges and blessings, and this slow type of moral erosion is one of the challenges.

There is a lot of wisdom to be found in these pages, especially when he talks about how Western ambivalence contributes to the amazing variety of moral wells people in the West may draw from. I just wish he would, like Tocqueville, split his paragraphs up and keep his sections brief.

[Scott Collingwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most inspiring and enlightening, the purport of this book can be carried into any field and used with great effect. As might be expected from a work by a leading academic, much of it simply flows 'in one ear and out the other', but there are so many gems of cogent contemporary coherence that the general impression gained will guarantee a repeated reading of this book. Aside from that, Prof. Minogue's key points about individualism and moral agency are made so clearly and strongly and with such resonance that they provide an immediate and I have to say very welcome clarifying effect on what was before an increasingly blurry moral and policital landscape. There's a kind of sardonic humour, akin to but infinitely far subtler than that used by Richard Daughty, "the Mogambo Guru", in conveying what really amounts to an emergency in a way that raises a chuckle, but without minimising the situation. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have.

[Drew Bullock · Rating 2 out of 5]

Plodding, verbose, meandering. A case study in failing to distinguish the proximate genus. It's a great deal more indignation at finding the neighbor children on one's lawn than it is incisive commentary on the status quo in Western social and political culture. BOOOOOOOOOORING.

[Eduardo Garcia-Gaspar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buen libro, buenas ideas. Necesario para ver lados oscuros de la democracia

[Booksearcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would have been an excellent book if his style had been more straight and to the point. Could have said the same thing and better in less pages.

[Michelle Tran]

Hard to rate this, as I had a hard time following his arguments, so I'm going to leave this unrated. The book feels like a meandering discussion on conservative talking points, which implies that certain things (like freedom over comfort or tradition over the "new and shiny") are more "moral" or desirable. And when the conversation becomes a debate on whose morals are better, it begins to feel like a bikeshedding festival, rather than being insightful. This is a shame, as I think there is some interesting insights into the paradoxical nature of democratic governments legislating morality and its effects on people coming to their own conclusion about what is moral (and hence "eroding" the core thing that makes something moral, which is a personal conviction of it).

Maybe I'll finish this book in the future, but I've got other things to read and other reviewers summarized the actually important insights in a more time-efficient read.