How to dip into political philosophy

Beneath the polarised political spats that characterise our national conversation, there is a surprising degree of consensus between left and right on what is wrong with society. Selfishness, corruption, tribalism and a failure to build for the long term – these are universally decried. We can all see the same glitching appliances, but we seem determined not to follow the leads back to the same plugs.

There appear occasionally thinkers that dig beneath the political fray and offer insight into how these political differences have come about. Three such writers that were published a generation ago, and have since been proved unequivocally right, are now available in my new preferred medium, the audio book. I thought it might prove instructive to revisit them.

Christopher Lasch, a Nebraskan Cassandra who anticipated not only America’s coming woes but many of ours, too, is perhaps the best of them. Lasch, a genial fellow who shared a room with John Updike at Harvard, made that familiar intellectual journey, exemplified by Christopher Hitchens, from Neo-Marxist in his 60s youth to sound good sense in his later years, before being cut off cruelly by cancer at just 61.