IPA Review Articles

10 March 2009

Scott Hargreaves reviews Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster, 2005, 944 pages) In selecting Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State President Obama has made history repeat itself. His historical guide-book is Team of Rivals, a big fat gem of a book from Doris Kearns Goodwin which has proven irresistible to the US political class and also

25 February 2009

100 Great Books of Liberty is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the books which made liberty the most important idea of Western Civilisation. From Plato’s The Republic and The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, these 100 books have laid the foundation for the modern world. Covering history, biography, philosophy, politics,

10 July 2008

Scott Hargreaves reviews Young Stalin. Young Stalin is in the best Hollywood tradition of the prequel. Written after the highly rated and popular work on Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, Young Stalin delves into his early life as a son, student, poet, radical, husband, gangster, and conspiracist. Also in the Hollywood tradition, the author, Simon Montefiore, has the

10 January 2008

George Ayittey’s book, Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa’s Future, was published in 2004 by Palgrave Macmillan. When you are the new kid on the block, the swiftest and surest way of making a name for yourself is to pick a fight with whoever is the current king of the heap. If the competition is to see who knows the

1 January 2008

Regulation is a political activity. It sets the framework for the market economy by defining the boundaries between private action and government action. Yet those boundaries are not fixed. Australian governments are growing the body of regulation – and the resources dedicated to regulating – at an ever increasing pace. This growth in regulation has more than just economic consequences.

31 October 2006

Far from the wars of Old Europe, relatively immune to the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, and endowed with ample land and resources to fit a country many times our population, Australia has had a lot going for it. However, this also means that we can be squarely blamed for some of the disastrous policies enacted by governments either propelled

10 October 2006

Jason Briant reviews The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America and Politics Without God by George Weigal (Basic Books, 2005, 202 pages) Anyone who takes an interest in foreign policy will know that the relationship between the United States and continental Europe has been becoming increasingly rocky over recent years. Growing disagreement over foreign policy across the Atlantic has been at

10 July 2006

‘Peter Drucker is probably the bestknown writer in the world on the philosophical and practical aspects of industrial management.’ So wrote the editor of the IPA Review in 1956 when introducing a piece written by Drucker for the IPA on ‘The Management Horizon’. Over succeeding decades, Drucker’s reputation grew to the point where he was dubbed the ‘father of modern

10 July 2002

Download the full book here. Much of the world is still horrible but during the final quarter of the 20th Century life spans greatly increased almost everywhere especially in the once-poor countries of East Asia. The economic order that achieved these momentous gains is now threatened by ‘anti-globalisation’. We began the new millennium with blessings close to home. Australians were

10 September 2000

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood .… Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves to some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some