Something a little different today–a new translation of François-René de Chateaubriand’s “Mémoires d’Outre-Tomb” (“Memoirs from Beyond the Grave”), translated by Alex Andriesse and published by New York Review of Books Classics. Chateaubriand was a French aristocrat and an enormous talent representative of France’s high Romantic style. Another of his earlier works, Les Martyrs, Ou Le Triomphe de la Religion Chrétienne, is a kind of extended poem on the early Christian martyrs. In this late work, he writes very critically about the French Revolution relatively late in his life. Here is a helpful review of the book and the new translation.

Written over the course of four decades, François-René de Chateaubriand’s epic autobiography has drawn the admiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Barthes, and Sebald. Here, in the first books of his massive Memoirs, spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looks back on the already bygone world of his youth. He recounts the history of his aristocratic family and the first rumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls playing games on the beaches of Saint-Malo, wandering in the woods near his father’s castle in Combourg, hunting with King Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first heads carried on pikes through the streets of Paris, meeting with George Washington in Philadelphia, and falling hopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlotte in the small Suffolk town of Bungay. The volume ends with Chateaubriand’s return to France after seven years of exile in England.

In this new edition (the first unabridged English translation of any portion of the Memoirs to be published in more than a century), Chateaubriand emerges as a writer of great wit and clarity, a self deprecating egotist whose meditations on the meaning of history, memory, and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsy and memorable gloom.

Here is a new book describing–it appears in negative terms (though this is speculation at this point)–the practice of originalism in constitutional interpretation as an exercise of “faith”: Originalism as Faith (CUP) by law professor and self-declared anti-originalist Eric Segall. Segall follows in the path of other law professors, like Sandy Levinson, who have described ways of believing in the Constitution in religious terms. For an effort of my own a few years ago along these lines, see this paper on the rule of law. It will be interesting to see how Segall describes “faith” as distinct from other epistemological ways of believing and/or knowing.

Originalism as Faith presents a comprehensive history of the originalism debates. It shows how the doctrine is rarely used by the Supreme Court, but is employed by academics, pundits and judges to maintain the mistaken faith that the Court decides cases under the law instead of the Justices’ personal values. Tracing the development of the doctrine from the founding to present day, Eric Segall shows how originalism is used by judges as a pretext for reaching politically desirable results. The book also presents an accurate description and evaluation of the late Justice Scalia’s jurisprudence and shows how he failed to practice the originalism method that he preached. This illuminating work will be of interest to lawyers, law students, undergraduates studying the Court, law professors and anyone else interested in an honest discussion and evaluation of Originalism as a theory of constitutional interpretation, a political weapon, and an article of faith.

Listed more because of its reference to “tradition” than for anything directly related to religion, but this one looks to have in intriguing thesis: Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness (Penguin Random House) by Joseph Kennedy. The thesis, which seems to draw inspiration primarily from British politics but perhaps also American politics, seems to come from a radical leftist direction–that liberals have contributed to the present fragmentation of politics by being insufficiently left wing, and by adopting and promoting the rhetoric of traditionalism and populism (described by the author as an amalgam of “authenticity” coopted by the managerial and bureaucratic classes for their own ends) from the right.

Here is a book we are late to notice, but that I am reading and enjoying now: The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom (CUP), by Thomas G. West, published last year. The core claim of the book is that the natural rights framework of the early republic can explain, in a comprehensive way–that is, without too much recurrence to other cultural and historical factors including Protestantism as well as European enlightenment thought–the founders’ shared assumptions about the interplay of rights and duties. Liberalism and republicanism, in West’s treatment, do not coexist in an uneasy tension, but are entirely consistent and mutually reinforcing. I am finding it a useful treatment of the conception of natural rights as it existed at the founding, and helpful also in identifying competing claims about the relationship of rights and duties.

This book provides a complete overview of the American Founders’ political theory, covering natural rights, natural law, state of nature, social compact, consent, and the policy implications of these ideas. The book is intended as a response to the current scholarly consensus, which holds that the Founders’ political thought is best understood as an amalgam of liberalism, republicanism, and perhaps other traditions. West argues that, on the contrary, the foundational documents overwhelmingly point to natural rights as the lens through which all politics is understood. The book explores in depth how the Founders’ supposedly republican policies on citizen character formation do not contradict but instead complement their liberal policies on property and economics. Additionally, the book shows how the Founders’ embraced other traditions in their politics, such as common law and Protestantism.