Brad Birzer

Bradley Birzer, a professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan who is on a one-year visiting scholar appointment at the University of Colorado at Boulder, took time out of his teaching schedule to write a thoughtful review of my book Rush: Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Excellence. Birzer is a conservative humanist, probably not unlike Neil Peart, and is the author of well-received books on Charles Carroll, one of our country’s lesser known founding fathers but an inspirational man who exemplified the ideal of Republican virtue, and on Christopher Dawson, the eminent Catholic historian.

I’m grateful Birzer gives the book a thumb’s up. He knows his history and his philosophy and he knows his Rush as well as anyone. So, I feel like the main idea of my book—that Aristotelian individualism is at the root of Rush’s lyrics—passed a big test.

Birzer’s main…