Payne authors book analyzing modern politics
Local author James L. Payne recently published a new book analyzing modern politics, “The Big Government We Love to Hate”.
Payne, a political scientist who taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins and Texas A&M University before moving to Sandpoint, has written 22 books in his field.
“You might say this book distills what I’ve learned after some 60 years of trying to figure out what’s going on with government,” said the 82-year-old scholar.
Payne researched his first book in 1961 when, as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, he went to Peru and studied the labor movement. The result was “Labor and Politics in Peru” published by Yale University Press. Since that time, He has written books on other Latin American countries, and works on the Congress, welfare policy, and the tax system.
The current book explains why the public keeps looking to government for solutions despite many past failures.
“It turns out that there is a widespread, unexamined faith in government,” Payne said, noting that this attachment resembles a religious commitment, and goes back many thousands of years.
“We find it in the Old Testament, in Plato and other early philosophers,” he added.
According to Payne, the first thinker to recognize and overcome this “cultural presumption” in favor of government was William Godwin, an English clergyman who wrote in 1793. Since that time, many more thinkers have questioned the faith in government, but this “libertarian” perspective is small minority.
“The majority of people still assume that whatever the problem is, however poorly understood, government can fix it,” he said.
In addition to his work as a political scientist, Payne also writes about his solo kayak voyages in the U.S. and other countries. He has published four books of his kayak travel adventures.
A publication and book-signing party for “The Big Government We Love to Hate” will be held at Vanderford’s Books, 201 Cedar St., on Saturday, July 10, from 12 to 2 p.m. The public is invited.
