The author of "Social Security and Its Discontents" now maintains that the Bush administration, Congress, and large parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement have abandoned traditional conservative ideals and embraced the idea of big government.

One of the most challenging passages in the book of Job is the Lord's long description of a hippopotamus and crocodile. In this NSBT, Eric Ortlund argues that Behemoth and Leviathan are better understood as symbols of cosmic chaos and evil, helping readers appreciate the reward of Job's faith (and ours) as we endure in trusting God while living in an unredeemed creation.

The ideas and policies that are percolating down from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill—increased government intervention, calls to “spread the wealth around,” onerous regulations, and bailouts for all—are not new. We’ve been down this road before. We know where it leads. It is that forlorn byway that Friedrich von Hayek called the Road to Serfdom. The good news is we don’t have to go down that road again. Resurrecting 18th-century style pamphleteering, Encounter Broadsides provide the intellectual ammunition for the battle over America’s future. From the folly of Obamacare, to the politicization of the Justice Department, or disastrous efforts to nationalize our education system, each Encounter Broadside assaults a new tentacle of the rising statism. Now, for the first time, The New Leviathan collects these salvos in one essential handbook. The New Leviathan is edited by Roger Kimball with contributions from John R. Bolton, Daniel DiSalvo, Richard A. Epstein, Peter Ferrara, John Fund, Victor Davis Hanson, Andrew C. McCarthy, Betsy McCaughey, Stephen Moore, Michael B. Mukasey, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Rich Trzupek, and Kevin D. Williamson. Together, they make the definitive case for liberty and democratic capitalism at a time when they are under siege from the resurgence of collectivist sentiment.

Written during a moment in English history when the political and social structures were in flux and open to interpretation, Leviathan played an essential role in the development of the modern world.

Hobbes's political theory has traditionally been taken to be an endorsement of state power and a prescription for unconditional obedience to the sovereign's will. In this book, Susanne Sreedhar develops a novel interpretation of Hobbes's theory of political obligation and explores important cases where Hobbes claims that subjects have a right to disobey and resist state power, even when their lives are not directly threatened. Drawing attention to this broader set of rights, her comprehensive analysis of Hobbes's account of political disobedience reveals a unified and coherent theory of resistance that has previously gone unnoticed and undefended. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in the nature and limits of political authority, the right of self-defense, the right of revolution, and the modern origins of these issues.

At a time when the national political debate is about inequality and fairness, bestselling au­thor David Horowitz and coauthor Jacob Laksin have written an unsettling book about the distribu­tion of power in America. Thoroughly researched and amply documented, The New Leviathan over­turns the conventional wisdom about which end of the political spectrum represents the rich and pow­erful, and which represents the people. The Democratic Party presents itself to the electorate as the party of working families and the poor. In the 2000 election campaign, Democrat Al Gore ran on the slogan “The People vs. the Powerful,” while President Obama describes him­self as a “grassroots organizer” and a spokesman for “fairness” and “progressive change.” Such is the world of political myth. In reality, the Demo­crats and the Obama progressives represent the richest and most powerful political machine in American history. Backed by a near trillion-dollar treasury in America’s oldest and largest tax-exempt foundations, progressives outspend conservatives by a factor of seven to one. In The New Leviathan, David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin examine this growing financial power of left-wing organizations and politicians. They show how left-wing foundations under­wrote the political career of Barack Obama and how massive funding advantages for progressive proposals have disenfranchised American voters and shifted the national policy debate dramatically to the left. The New Leviathan draws connections between the Obama administration and progres­sive organizations from labor unions to media outlets to nonprofits to political groups, and shows how on key policy fronts—national security, immigration, citizenship, environment, and health care—the sheer force of left-wing financial resources has reconfigured the nation’s political agenda.

From two legal luminaries, a highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as “the deep state.” Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials who respect that morality never fail to make rules in the first place. They ensure transparency, so that people are made aware of the rules with which they must comply. They never abuse retroactivity, so that people can rely on current rules, which are not under constant threat of change. They make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, without explicit enunciation, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. But we can aspire for better. In more robust form, these principles could address many of the concerns that have critics of the administrative state mourning what they see as the demise of the rule of law. The bureaucratic Leviathan may be an inescapable reality of complex modern democracies, but Sunstein and Vermeule show how we can at last make peace between those who accept its necessity and those who yearn for its downfall.