Diversity. Inclusiveness. Equality.—ubiquitous words in 21st-century political and social life. But how do those who police the limits of acceptable discourse employ these as verbal weapons to browbeat their often hapless fellows into having a “real conversation”? How do these terms function as mere doublespeak for the expectation of full-scale capitulation to the views of “right-thinking people”? Those who have long been afraid to touch the issues that attend these words will take great reassurance in an articulate statement of the kind presented in Against Inclusiveness, where the author’s approach is sober and extremely well reasoned, as he attempts to marshal truth and fairness as criteria in the examination of issues critical to modern social life. Against Inclusiveness lays the foundation for what an honest, forthright, real conversation on these matters might look like.
Praise
“This critique is simply unsurpassed.”
— PAUL GOTTFRIED
author of After Liberalism and Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt
“Jim Kalb once again drills to the bedrock of the radically centrifugal liberal ideology that has devastated our society's institutions, its culture, its conceptions of normality, and its traditional patterns of social life.”
— ROBERT JACKALL
Professor of Sociology & Public Affairs, Williams College
“Against Inclusiveness is a first-rate thinker’s look at a paradox that is ‘at once the perfection and the death of equality.’”
— CHRISTOPHER A. FERRARA
author of Liberty, the God That Failed
“James Kalb’s analysis is both profound and commonsensical, and brings clarity and insight to an area fraught with fear and falsehood.”
— CAROL IANNONE
editor of Academic Questions and founding Vice President of the National Association of Scholars
“A timely, incisive work, Against Inclusiveness builds upon themes introduced in Kalb’s previous work, The Tyranny of Liberalism, and presents a precise, methodical examination of the real-life dystopia we inhabit. It succeeds in carefully exploring and connecting an astonishing variety of issues.”
— The Catholic World Report
About the Author
James Kalb comes by his interest in political theory naturally, through politically active parents and degrees in mathematics and law (Dartmouth B.A., Yale J.D.). His parents showed him the importance of participation, mathematics showed him the importance of how principles are stated, and law taught him to study decisions to find the principles behind them. His writing explores the nature of liberal political society—what it is, what is wrong with it, why it seems so incontestable, what to do about it.
