[The European Journal] TEJ's Reading List

A look at some of the best titles of the past year — and a sneak peek of what to watch in 2021.

Editor’s note — this reading list features in the 2021 print issue of The European Journal, the official magazine of New Direction, the hub of European conservatism founded in 2009 by Margaret Thatcher. Read the freely downloadable PDF copy of the issue here.

The best of 2020:

Head Hand Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. By David Goodhart. Allen Lane; 368 pages; £20.00.

Meritocracy is no longer all the rage. Basing our notions of “status” on the fuzzy concept of “merit” began merely as a method to staff government bureaucracies challenged by the complexity of the industrial era in the 19th century, but it has since metastasized into a holistic regime, if tacit, for apportioning social esteem across the board, in a way that has vindicated Karl Popper’s (apocryphal) dictum that “History is the process of solving old problems by unwittingly producing new ones”. And just as this strategy’s collateral damage started seeing the day in the…