Recent Books
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will turn not just on hard power but also
on each country’s ability to command the
moral high ground.
Nationalism: A Short History
BY LIAH GREENFELD. Brookings
Institution Press, 2019, 158 pp.
Greenfeld, the author o massive
historical-sociological studies o the rise
o nationalism, capitalism, and moder-
nity, here distills the story o national-
ism into a short and captivating historical
drama. She traces the origins o “na-
tional consciousness” to sixteenth-
century England, when the new Tudor
monarchy was attempting to rebuild—
and legitimate—the political order
following the destruction o the aristoc-
racy in the dynastic wars o the previ-
ous century. The old self-understanding
o England as a social hierarchy was
replaced with an image o “the nation,”
made up o a single English people.
Greenfeld argues that the notions o
social equality—secular, democratic,
and egalitarian—that dominated this
English-led “revolution in conscious-
ness” played out across the rest o the
world in the following centuries. The
Protestant Reformation, the American
and French Revolutions, the rise o
commercial capitalism, the coming o
modern science, the emergence o
modern Chinese and Japanese national-
ism—all have their place in Greenfeld’s
grand narrative. Greenfeld argues that
nationalism’s appeal Çows from the
dignity that a vibrant national con-
sciousness bestows on a nation’s mem-
bers. The task for those seeking to
preserve the liberal democratic way o
life is to reclaim nationalism’s progres-
sive orientation.
Economic, Social, and
EnvironmentalRichard N. Cooper
Fireghting: The Financial Crisis and Its
Lessons
BY BEN S. BERNANKE, TIMOTHY F.
GEITHNER, AND HENRY M.
PAULSON, JR. Penguin Books, 2019,
240 pp.T
his collaboration by the three
U.S. government ocials who
led the ¿ght in the United
States against the ¿nancial crisis o 2008
presents a mature and revealing assess-
ment o the genesis and dynamics o the
meltdown—and o the government’s
ultimate success in halting it, although
not before a painful recession had set in.
One o the most interesting points is
that they did not want Lehman Brothers
to collapse in September 2008, despite
some claims to the contrary, but lacked
the legal authority to prevent it. The
authors also argue that the many bailouts
o other ¿nancial institutions worked, as
they stopped a panic that could have
been much worse. In the end, taxpayers
recovered much more than they paid out,
and executives and shareholders lost
heavily, as they should have in a capital-
ist system—a point that undercuts fears
that the bailouts would generate moral
hazard and thus lead management and
shareholders to take more risks in the
future. Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson
believe that the U.S. economy is much
better positioned to avoid a ¿nancial
crisis today than it was in 2007 but that