Friend and former colleague Paul Wells celebrated the launch of his first book earlier this week. It’s called Right Side Up and is account of the fall of the Paul Martin and rise of Stephen Harper. Early on in the book, one of Harper’s closest friends, John Weissenberger, talks about the kinds of books he and the future prime minister got into while they were both studying at the University of Calgary in the early 1980s.
“We spent a couple of years sort of doing a very broad review of the classic texts of classical liberal economies and political theory. A dozen or two dozen books that we had read and we discussed. You know, the Austrian school, Hayek, a couple of Buckley’s books — God and Man at Yale, Up From Liberalism. Peter Berger, a guy who wrote a lot of interesting stuff in the eighties, on the transition from the liberal state. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.”
– John Weissenberger, quoted in Right Side Up, by Paul Wells