Ah, been harping this book for quite some time now #1535728, #1591296, #1534753. Finally the review is out: book itself released next month (Nov 16).
Equality of Permission: The Politics of Feasible Liberalism is very much more of the same... (if you know one serious McCloskey book, you know most of them)... but this one is spicier, funnier, and if possible more eloquent.
The book’s rather silly title, equality of permission, isn’t particularly memorable or descriptive; and in the prose, McCloskey moves away from it quite quickly — with the majority of the book discussing “primary liberalism” instead. The equality of permission is described in Bourgeois Equality, the final part of her Bourgeois Era trilogy, where everyday folk are legally and socially considered equals.
also, this: #1534753
In contrast to dumbed-down AI output and hot, inflammatory, viral takes, what she asks us to do is almost a lost art: to “[a]rgue seriously, so that we can together in a liberal conversation discern the truth.” She opens the book in Chapter 2 with this neat, respectful ask: maybe — just maybe — the statist within you might be mistaken about something, big time.
The nine most dangerous words in the English language
Oh, and the lewd bit I refer to in the review, but don't develop, is here:
I laughed at that one fooooor days.
My fav portion comes at the end, where the editor took a knife to my wonderfully flowy language!
If I said or wrote things like this, they’d come out snarky and insulting; ranty and altogether unserious. Somehow McCloskey has the intellectual respect and smooth-talking standing to pull it off.
and instead of
It’s pure bliss to be reading Permission of Equality. The substance is great and, to a market-friendly intellectual, quite familiar. But the way the words sing, the ink splashed across the pages with melody and rhythm, the reading becomes a full-on experience rather than a regurgitation of facts or a carefully threaded and polemic policy paper.
...we got:
Equality of Permission is strong in substance and, to a market-friendly intellectual, quite familiar. But the writing has melody and rhythm, making the reading a full-on experience rather than a regurgitation of facts or a polemic policy paper.
and the finishing
Because the words and sentences and paragraphs aren’t dumbed-down AI mechanics, not merely a stale conveyor belt of concept, the flowy linguistic excellence takes some getting used to. But once there, the message of primary liberalism becomes explosively powerful.
...turned into:
You seem to have an overly risk averse editor, haha. But I get it, if I ran a publication I might get a bit antsy about some of your more colorful phrases too.
To the list of horrible sentences in the English language, I'll add a fourth, but it probably deserves the top spot. "That's not fair."
I also had words chained together. Will do a writing post on that later in the week