The Claremont Review of Books is of course the flagship publication of the Claremont Institute.

To my 19-year-old son, World War I — which ended 100 years ago yesterday — is as remote an event as the Congress of Berlin was to me when I was his age. To my generation, World War I was not quite history. My father’s father, John Ferguson, had joined up at the age of 17 and fought on the Western Front as a private in the Seaforth Highlanders. He was one of more than 6 million men from Great Britain who served. Of that number, 722,785 did not come back alive. Just under half of all those who lost their lives were aged between 16 and 24 — a fact that never fails to startle.

In the early 20th century, socialist Zionist zeal inspired Jewish pioneers in the Land of Israel to form collective farms known as kibbutzim. In them all property was held in common, children were raised communally, and the maxim “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was strictly observed. Economic theory would seem to suggest that kibbutzim would fail, but they did not.