9 New Books We Recommend This Week Jan. 7, 2021 For no particular reason, today might be a good day to read Edmund Fawcett’s “Conservatism” — an intellectual history that explores how one political philosophy can give rise to wildly divergent politics. The book doesn’t limit its discussion to America, or to the present day, but for anybody riveted and shaken by images of rioters storming the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the orderly progress of democracy this week, it does offer a valuable wide-lens perspective on currents that have been at play for decades if not centuries. (Fawcett is a journalist, and by nature more an analyst than an agitator; in an earlier book he likewise explored the origins and contradictions of liberalism.)