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WORK TITLE: A TIME TO BUILD
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CITY: Washington
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LAST VOLUME: CANR 324
http://www.eppc.org/fellows-scholars/yuval-levin/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2013/12/06/c0b1e0b4-2142-11e3-966c-9c4293c47ebe_story.html * http://www.nationalreview.com/author/yuval-levin * http://www.albertmohler.com/2016/07/04/thinking-public-yuval-levin/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born April 6, 1977, in Haifa, Israel; American citizen.
EDUCATION:American University, B.A.; University of Chicago, M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
President’s Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, executive director, 2001-04; Domestic Policy Council at the White House, Washington, DC, assistant to the president, 2004-07; New Atlantis cofounder and senior editor, 2003–; National Affairs, founding editor, 2009–; Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, DC, director of Bioethics and American Democracy, became Hertog Fellow, 2007-2019; American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies, 2019–.
AWARDS:Hertog fellowship, Ethics and Public Policy Center.
POLITICS: Republican.WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Jerusalem Post, Public Interest, Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and the Weekly Standard. Contributing editor, National Review; contributing editor, Weekly Standard, 1995-2018; founding editor, National Affairs.
SIDELIGHTS
Yuval Levin’s areas of interest include political philosophy, religion, bioethics, science and technology, and domestic policy. Born in 1977, he served as executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics under President George W. Bush from 2003 to 2005. Levin then became the Bush administration’s associate director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House, where he worked on issues relating to public health, food and drug regulations, biomedical research, veterans’ health, HIV/AIDS, and bioethics.
Following his positions on the White House executive staff, Levin joined the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) as director of its program on Bioethics and American Democracy. Levin is also a recipient of the EPPC’s Hertog fellowship and senior editor of the EPPC journal the New Atlantis. Levin is a contributing editor of the National Review and has published numerous essays and articles in publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Public Interest, and the Weekly Standard.
In his 2001 book,Tyranny of Reason: The Origins and Consequences of the Social Scientific Outlook, Levin discusses the limitations of the “social scientific outlook,” which advocates the application of modern science as an instrument to understand society. Levin also details what he sees as the harmful social effects of reason and cites various historical examples, such as how a social scientific mindset led to Soviet Communism. He argues that the failure to understand that humans are different from scientifically explainable aspects of the physical world can inhibit human freedom and the search for meaning.
Levin is the editor, with Christopher DeMuth, of Religion and the American Future, released in 2008. Levin wrote the introduction to the collection, which includes articles on the end of the secular age, faith-based voting, science versus moral quandaries, and the relationship between science and politics.
In Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy, published in 2008, Levin contends that science, which he views as a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, is an ideological corrosive that undermines other sources of wisdom and leads to moral quandary. Developing his argument further, he focuses in particular on the controversy surrounding embryonic stem cell research.
In a review of Imagining the Future for the Weekly Standard, Steven J. Lenzner commented: “Levin has a deep understanding of American political life, but he also has an expert knowledge of political philosophy, and puts both to good use in this important and enlightening book.” Lenzner added: “To be sure, Levin is not the first to observe the hidden political foundations and aims of modern science, but you would be hard pressed to find a treatment that is equally accessible, engaging, and precise. What is new here is the manner in which he uses his scholarly knowledge to illumine the character of our contemporary (and future) political life.”
In his 2014 book, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, Levin traces the origin of contemporary conservatism and liberalism back to a philosophical debate between two great political thinkers. While Thomas Paine was a revolutionary and firebrand, Edmund Burke was a British parliamentarian who valued tradition and hierarchy. Levin reveals how Paine believed government should align with what he conceived of as natural law and rest on reason, whereas Burke believed government should be informed by lessons of the past, changing only what no longer works. Levin finds in their differing viewpoints the seeds of current American parties. At the same time, he critiques both parties for lapses in their positions.
“Levin perceptively demonstrates the philosophical routes to liberalism and conservatism for politics-minded readers,” remarked Gilbert Taylor in a review for Booklist. A Kirkus Reviews critic noted that Levin “maintains a generally disinterested balance throughout—although at times it reads like an earnest term paper from a talented, assiduous student.” The reviewer nonetheless concluded that Levin offers “some arresting reminders of our political past.” A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that Levin’s subjects “don’t line up perfectly along the Democrat/Republican divide, but he unearths the roots of latter-day convictions in their far-reaching argument.”
In The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism, Levin traces the disintegration of American culture in the post-World War II years and explains how this development has contributed to social and political polarization. Levin writes that the progressive and conservative movements both offer a message that is essentially nostalgic. The author stated in an interview with Albert Mohler posted on Mohler’s Web site: “The Democrats want to rerun The Great Society and the Republicans want to rerun the Reagan Revolution.” But both sides, he continued, miss part of the picture: “The left misses the much more consolidated economy, the stronger labor unions, the stronger government. The right misses the stronger families, the stronger culture, and mediating institutions. And so the left bemoans the economic liberalizations we’ve seen; the right bemoans the cultural liberalization. But of course those are two sides of the same coin.”
The United States emerged from the Great Depression and World War II with a strong economy and a strong sense of social cohesion. But cultural and economic liberalization, beginning in the 1950s and early 1960s, led to a breakdown of this cohesion—a development that, the author points out, Americans had generally wanted, having become frustrated with a culture of stifling conformity. Though much was attractive in post-war American culture, there were obvious inequalities and injustices. The Civil Rights Movement, as well as the feminist movement and world economic growth, began to break down social structures that, while having created stability and cohesion, had also institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice. The more diverse and fragmented society that emerged as a result of liberalization, however, has created unique challenges, which Levin defined in the interview as “challenges of isolation, of family breakdown, of economic insecurity and dislocation.” However, as the author points out in the book, instead of providing new ideas for new challenges, politicians offer ideas that are based on nostalgia. Levin argues that the United States cannot turn back to an earlier era, but must find novel ways to address the challenges of living in a diverse society.
Though the book offers relatively few concrete recommendations, the author emphasizes that centralized policies will not work effectively in a fragmented society. As he explained in the interview, a better approach is to put “power as close to the level of the interpersonal community as is reasonably possible.” Doing this, in Levin’s view, not only solves problems but also nurtures a sense of communal responsibility.
Writing in the Economist, a reviewer of The Fractured Republic found Levin’s writing “precise, well-observed and witty” but added that the author “offers little on what the consequences of more decentralization would be, or where its limits are.” The reviewer pointed out, for example, that a weaker federal government might be welcome to certain conservatives, but less so to groups who have historically relied on the federal government to protect their civil rights. Commentary contributor David Bahr also noted the book’s focus on analysis rather than pragmatic solutions, stating: “ The Fragmented Republic is not a manual or blueprint for reform, and it does not offer a checklist of repairs to make America whole again. Instead, it merges a deep philosophic understanding of the American experiment and a conceptual analysis of American history into a practical basis from which we can examine contemporary American problems with crystalline clarity.”
Though some reviewers opined that the book’s message would resonate more with conservatives than progressives, a writer for Kirkus Reviews found the book “refreshingly optimistic” rather than polarizing, and recommended it highly “for readers of whatever political stripe.” Charles Murray, writing in the National Review, commented: “This marvelous book appears at the worst possible time. It is erudite at a moment when erudition is ridiculed; nuanced at a moment when simplistic idiocies win elections; motivated by a devotion to human flourishing at a moment when ‘human flourishing’ is calibrated in disposable income. But Levin deals in verities, and verities have a long shelf life. The Fractured Republic is an invaluable resource for understanding how America came to its present predicament and what must be done to rescue it.”
In his next book, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream, Levin presents his case that America is in a social crisis and, as a result, must make a renewed commitment to its institutions. In the process, he examines a wide range of issues, from what the lack of trust in institutions means and what defines an institution to what having and losing trust means and what is the extent of the loss of institutional confidence. Levin argues that America’s social crisis has resulted not only in gridlock in Washington but also a great divide among the American people. According to Levin, this divide has taken the form of a culture war apparent in many arenas of American life, from college campuses to the media, including social media.
Levin largely places blame for this crisis on the failings of America’s institutions, which many people have come to believe. In Levin’s opinion, the media has become elitist while government has failed to accomplish anything really significant for the American people. He also claims that the country’s higher education system has become dedicated to political correctness. As a result, Levin sees many Americans becoming alienated and succumbing to despair while family bonds weaken and opioid addictions increase. To make his case, Levin examines a wide range of examples from the broad spectrum of Americans’ political, professional, civic, and religious lives.
Levin continues his argument that the political and social right and left are both culprits in attacking American’s institutions, fostering anger among the American people. For example, he points to polls showing that only around eleven percent of Americans have a positive view of congress and only a third a positive view of the presidency. Nevertheless, Levin argues that, instead of tearing down institutions, it is through these institutions that America can overcome what he perceives as the era’s unique sectarian divisions. He believes the prescription for reforming institutions is the responsibility of all Americans. Levin emphasizes the need to try and understand opposing viewpoints and recommit to America’s institutions, from the military and churches to schools and families.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor called A Time to Build “a provocative, inspiring look at the underlying cause of our polarization and dysfunction.” A reviewer writing for Publishers Weekly Online noted: “The modesty of Levin’s proposals feels both refreshing and anticlimactic,” adding the book is more likely to appeal to “mainstream Republicans” unhappy with their party rather than liberals who are likely to find Levin’s arguments “dismissive of the inequities that exist within institutions.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 2013, Gilbert Taylor, review of The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, p. 4.
Christian Century, October 26, 2016, Anthony B. Robinson, review of The Fractured Republic, p. 36.
Commentary, May, 2016, David Bahr, review of The Fractured Republic, p. 45.
Economist, July 16, 2016, review of The Fractured Republic, p. 70.
First Things, February, 2011, Ryan T. Anderson, review of Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver: Honoring the Work of Leon R. Kass.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2013, review of The Great Debate; March 15, 2016, review of The Fractured Republic; November 15, 2019, review of A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.
National Review, June 27, 2016, Charles Murray, review of The Fractured Republic, p. 40.
New Criterion, June, 2016, James Piereson, review of The Fractured Republic, p. 83.
New York Times, May 20, 2016, David Brooks, review of The Fractured Republic, p. A25.
Publishers Weekly, September 23, 2013, review of The Great Debate, p. 67; march 28, 2016, review of The Fractured Republic, p. 85.
Reference & Research Book News, August, 2012, review of A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions from the Pages of National Affairs.
Xpress Reviews, July 1, 2016, Laurel Tacoma, review of The Fractured Republic.
Washington Post, May 14, 2016, Carlos Lozada, “After Trump, a Humbler Conservative Movement?”
Weekly Standard, December 8, 2008, Steven J. Lenzner, “Biomorality: The Uses and Abuses of Science in Political Life,” review of Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy.
ONLINE
Albert Mohler, http://www.albertmohler.com/ (February 9, 2017), Albert Mohler, “Thinking in Public: Our Fractured Society: A Conversation with Yuval Levin.”
Ethics and Public Policy Center, http://www.eppc.org/ (April 1, 2009), author profile.
Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, http://www.thefreemanonline.org/ (August 1, 2002), review of Tyranny of Reason: The Origins and Consequences of the Social Scientific Outlook.
National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/ (February 9, 2017), Robert Siegel, All Things Considered interview with Levin.
National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/ (February 9, 2017), Levin profile.
New Atlantis Web, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/ (April 1, 2009), author profile.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/(November 7, 2019), review of A Time to Build.
OTHER
NRO Radio (audio file), October 28, 2008, “Yuval Levin on Imagining the Future.”
Yuval Levin is the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the founder and editor of National Affairs. He is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and National Review.
Yuval Levin
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Yuval Levin
Born
April 6, 1977 (age 42)
Haifa, Israel
Education
American University (BA)
University of Chicago (MA, PhD)
Notable work
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right (2013)
Yuval Levin (born April 6, 1977)[1] is an American political analyst, public intellectual, academic, and journalist. He is the founding editor of National Affairs (2009–present), director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute[2] (2019–present), a contributing editor of National Review (2007–present) and co-founder and a senior editor of The New Atlantis (2003–present).
Levin was vice president and Hertog Fellow of Ethics and Public Policy Center (2007–19), executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics (2001–04), Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy (2004–07) and contributing editor to The Weekly Standard (1995–2018). Prior to that he served as a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels.
Levin's essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and others. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently “The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism” (Basic Books, 2016). In early 2020, he will publish his next book, “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream” (Basic Books).
Contents
1
Early life and education
2
Career
3
Works
4
References
5
External links
Early life and education[edit]
Levin was born in Haifa, Israel, and moved to the United States with his family at the age of eight.[3] He earned a bachelor's degree in political science at American University, and earned a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Career[edit]
Levin is the author of four books, and of numerous essays and articles dealing largely with political theory, science, technology, and public policy. On the relationship between political theory and public policy, Levin has said:
For me, these things are very deeply connected. I think politics really is rooted in political philosophy, is much better understood when it's understood in light of political philosophy. And that a lot of the policy debates we have make much more sense if you see that people are arguing about two ways of understanding what the human person is, what human society is, and especially what the liberal society is. The left and right in our country are both liberal, they both believe in the free society, but they mean something very different by that.[4]
Conservatism, Levin has said, "understands society not as just individuals and government, but thinks of it in terms of everything that happens in between. That huge space between the individual and the state is where society actually is. And that's where families are, it's where communities are, it's where the market economy is." [5]
Levin has been called "probably the most influential conservative intellectual of the Obama era",[6] while The New Republic has dubbed Levin "the right's new Irving Kristol".[3]
Works[edit]
Levin, Yuval (2001). Tyranny of Reason: The Origins and Consequences of the Social Scientific Outlook. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. ISBN 9780761818724. OCLC 45087346.
Levin, Yuval (2008). Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. New York: Encounter Books. ISBN 9781594033308. OCLC 503444967.
Yuval, Levin (2014). The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 9780465050970. OCLC 858672374.
Yuval, Levin (2016). The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 9780465061969. OCLC 945121355.
Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs. He is also the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a senior editor of The New Atlantis, and a contributing editor to National Review and the Weekly Standard. He has been a member of the White House domestic policy staff (under President George W. Bush), executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and a congressional staffer. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and others, and he is the author, most recently, of The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism. He holds a BA from American University and a PhD from the University of Chicago.
Levin, Yuval A TIME TO BUILD Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 1, 21 ISBN: 978-1-5416-9927-4
The conservative political historian and founding National Affairs editor surveys a nation whose institutions are in crisis.
Continuing a project begun in 2016 with The Fractured Republic, Levin observes that contemporary Americans are "living through a social crisis," one that manifests in gridlock, bitterness, and "a culture war that seems increasingly to be dividing us into two armed camps angrily confronting each other in every corner and crevice of American life." It's not so much that we've lost faith in and patience with people who disagree with us, writes the author, but that we've witnessed the disintegration of the institutions that sustained us: journalism, which tends to an urban elitism; education, which imposes orthodoxies of political correctness; and government, which has descended into a cesspool of do-nothingism. Even after Richard Nixon left office in disgrace, he observes, more than half of Americans "expressed confidence in the presidency"; the current figure has fallen to a third. As for Congress, only 11% of respondents think it's doing anything positive--small wonder, Levin writes, since the members of that body "have come to understand themselves most fundamentally as players in a larger cultural ecosystem, the point of which is not legislating or governing but rather a kind of performative outrage for a partisan audience." It is perhaps to the benefits of the elites--who, Levin writes, used to number different casts of characters: one for education, one for politics, one for media, and the like, but who now largely comprise a single body--that Americans are divided and that institutions are weak. The revival of the pure, original notion of what our institutions are meant to do--the judiciary being a rare but not wholly uncompromised exception--"is essential to the revival of legitimate authority," the implication being that much present authority is not legitimate, and the charge falls on every citizen to do something about the mess by becoming active in reform.
A provocative, inspiring look at the underlying cause of our polarization and dysfunction.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Levin, Yuval: A TIME TO BUILD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A605549698/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a947a145. Accessed 6 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A605549698
A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
Yuval Levin. Basic Books, $28.00 (256) ISBN 978-1-5416-9927-4
More By and About This Author
National Affairs editor Levin (The Fractured Republic) examines how American society lost faith in its institutions in the 21st century and proposes steps to renew the public trust in this sober, conservatively minded inquiry. According to Levin, durability and structure are the defining characteristics of such institutions as Congress, the mainstream press, universities, corporations, the family, and the rule of law. “By giving shape to our experience of life in society,” he writes, “institutions give shape to our place in the world.” Individuals lose trust in an institution, he contends, when it is internally corrupted or when it becomes a platform to display individuality rather than to mold character. Levin sees the effects of such institutional degradation in “culture-war politics,” declining marriage and birth rates, and white Evangelicals’ loyalty to President Trump. He calls on Americans to reform institutions from within by being more trustworthy, aligning their personal and institutional identities, and working harder to understand opposing viewpoints. The modesty of Levin’s proposals feels both refreshing and anticlimactic, and liberals are likely to find him too dismissive of the inequities that exist within institutions. Mainstream Republicans dismayed by the current state of their party, however, will savor this well-reasoned and hopeful study. (Jan.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on : 11/07/2019
Release date: 01/21/2020
Genre: Nonfiction
Compact Disc - 978-1-5491-0366-7