{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023228111971411555, 'fraction_numerical': 0.006551518761167362, 'mean_word_length': 4.924162257495591, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship. Edited by Crocker David A. and Linden Toby. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. 585p. $84.50 cloth, $27.95 paper.

here. It usefully could be extended into a meditation on the adequacy of the foundations of Voegelin's science, a philosophic exercise that Cooper had to leave outside his scope in order to publish a volume of manageable size. Ellis Sandoz's book is an anthology of occasional papers, some of which were published in journals such as Modern Age, others of which were presented at conferences in the Czech Republic on the requirements for establishing democracy there after 1988, and some of which appear here for the first time. All the essays are intended as philosophical lessons in civics. All are inspired by a vision of a university and a profession of political science "that would secure the coherence of the American community and instill the principles of free government in rising generations" (p. 122). All are beautifully written. Although it is difficult to summarize the contents of a wide-ranging collection under a few headings, one could say that the Sandoz essays fall into six topical categories: the blessings of liberty; the grounding of free democratic government in eternal truth; the history of legal, philosophic, and religious discoveries and acknowledgments of truth; British and American law and civil religion as an embodiment of truth; the practical exigencies of establishing free government and transferring relevant aspects of the American model to Eastern Europe; and the contributions of Eric Voegelin to the science of the truths under consideration. If the essays have a common theme, it is that the line of recognition of eternal truth can be traced from the Bible and classical Greek philosophy to the Christian West; from there to the England of the Magna Carta, the common law jurists, Locke, and Sidney; and from there to the American colonists and founding fathers, not excluding Madison and Jefferson. Furthermore, Sandoz argues that the fall of Soviet-bloc communism has not eliminated threats to free government based on truth, because this evil has been replaced by a rampant, nihilistic deconstructionism that originated in Nietzsche. Sandoz calls his essays "untimely" because he knows that most contemporary scholars reject his vision of the university and the profession of political science. Yet, in the spirit of Washington and in keeping with Jefferson's reasons for founding the University of Virginia, one should welcome his book as a call to the profession to renew the search for a well-grounded American civics. This is not to say that everyone should or will agree with everything that Sandoz says. Countless American political polemics are full of earnestly quoted proof texts purporting to show that our polity was created by Founders who abhorred the very idea of linking public order to eternal truth. Where there is so much smoke there probably is some fire. I myself am not quite so sanguine as Sandoz about the commitments of Locke and Jefferson to Christian principles of order. Nevertheless, it would be useful for scholars to inquire into means of resolving, or at least living harmoniously with, the American tension between eternal truth, on the one hand, and secular enlightenment, on the other.