IPA Review Articles

1 August 2018

A new Richard Nixon biography uncovers more murky behaviour by the controversial president, writes Richard Allsop. Richard Nixon has already been the subject of plenty of biographies, but his controversial career and complex character continue to appeal to new biographers. The latest is John A Farrell whose biography of Nixon has at least one striking new piece of evidence about

11 May 2018

A new book by John Edwards explores the political life and relationships of Australia’s 14th Prime Minister, John Curtin  (John Curtin’s War, Volume 1: The Coming of War in the Pacific, and Reinventing Australia) What Paul Keating said at the launch of John Curtin’s War has attracted more publicity than the contents of the book itself. The cliché is that all publicity is good

10 May 2018

Morgan Begg reviews Keeping the Faith: The Battle for Australian Catholicism, by Fr James Grant. (this article first appeared in the May 2018 edition of the IPA Review. A PDF can be downloaded here). All religious establishments in the People’s Republic of China became bound by the government’s new ‘Regulations for Religious Affairs’ from February 1, 2018. The stated aim

20 July 2017

Corrupted by identity politics, high culture in the West is no longer about the search for truth or beauty, but merely a tool for the advancement of leftist social engineering. So argues Wall Street Journal editorial writer Sohrab Ahmari in The New Philistines, a polemic about contemporary art. Ahmari’s target is not any contemporary art form or style. Instead, he

1 March 2017

Paul Keating’s economic reforms put today’s poll-driven politicians to shame, writes Richard Allsop. Almost a decade ago, the IPA Review published a cover story about Paul Keating headlined ‘What we miss about Paul’. In the article, Greg Barns contended that politics in the 2000s lacked radical reformers like Margaret Thatcher, Roger Douglas, Jeff Kennett and Keating, and wished that there

9 November 2016

Libertarians hail the wonders of ‘private governance’-the idea that left to their own devices, free people will organise themselves without needing the coercive power of the state. To others, however, this libertarian view is akin to riding unicorns-no one can quite see any tangible examples. All they can see is the power of government, a potent force solving almost all

1 August 2016

To judge Roger Scruton by his demeanour and suitably tweedy appearance, it would be easy to assume he comes from a strand of British philosophy previously personified by the later versions of Michael Oakeshott; suspicious of Continental idealism and more generally, the practical claims of metaphysics and rationalism. But through his works we see he is supremely learned in the

10 September 2015

Chris Berg on Flemming Rose’s ‘controversial’ stand for free speech   Ten years ago in September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons and sparked what the Danish prime minister described as the worst crisis in Danish foreign policy since the Second World War. In his book, The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited A Global Debate on

10 September 2015

The last few years has borne witness to an extraordinary growth in government activities. Fiscal stimulus spending, the ramping up of public debt, untrammelled increases in regulation affecting factor and product markets, and the burgeoning growth of the national security apparatus have made us feel less happy, less prosperous, and less safe. If there is any consolation—if not a silver

10 May 2015

Adam Smith is a deeply underrated thinker. This might seem like a strange thing to say about the author of the Wealth of Nations, which is often described as free market capitalism’s foundational text. Adam Smith Clubs around the world sell ties with Smith’s face printed on them. Smith’s fame came during his lifetime. In How Adam Smith Can Change