“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” wrote George Orwell. The authors of A Front Row Seat at the End of History, M. L. R. Smith and the late David Martin Jones, had the courage to confront what lay plainly before them and to challenge the West’s complacency in the face of civilizational threats.

Drawing on a quarter-century of intellectual collaboration, this new collection of their essays offers a deeply insightful treatment of a breadth of topics including the fallout from the premature declaration of the “end of history,” the rise of Islamist “death cults,” the war on terror, renewed great power rivalry, and the cultural and economic malaise underlying resurgent nationalism. The collection paints a vivid, shrewd, and often critical picture of the West’s self-image since the end of the Cold War. Smith and Jones advance the case that the tradition of freedom in the West is precious and not inevitable; it must be nurtured and preserved from threatening forces both within and without. Lord Acton famously wrote to Bishop Creighton that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Smith and Jones note the expanding remit of politics and the costs that come with overreaching promises of justice. Indeed, they reveal that the expansion of the realm of politics has threatened traditional understandings of the barriers between morality and state power.

At the same time, Smith and Jones warn of the deleterious effects of inter-societal struggle and the erosion of civic morality. Offering words of caution in our response to illiberal threats such as terrorist violence, they argue that both studied indifference and cosmopolitan idealism in domestic and foreign affairs risks causing “apathetic passivity.” Smith and Jones reveal the hubris of the notion that the age of power-politics is over and that the modern state is “passing into history.” Indeed, the enemies of the West never bought into the declaration that history had ended. While not decidedly optimistic about the prospects for renewal in the West, their sharp analysis uncovers key benchmarks of hope. For example, in a thought-provoking paean to flustering 1970s Britain, Smith and Jones write of the social solidarity, cultural dynamism, and strong civic attachments which provided the necessary conditions for the national renewal that took place in the decade to follow.

I was fortunate to learn from both during my undergraduate years in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where Smith served as Head of Department and Jones held a visiting professorship. Although they authored many scholarly books and articles, they also wrote shorter, less formal essays for more popular audiences, which form the chapters of this book. Their commitment to accessible scholarship shines throughout the collection, conceived shortly before Jones’ untimely death in April 2024 and completed under Smith’s stewardship.

Jones and Smith first met in Singapore in 1992 as lecturers at the National University. Smith had studied the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the 1980s as part of his doctoral research, witnessing firsthand the bloody toll of cultural conflict in a landscape “rocked by bomb blasts.” Jones, meanwhile, had cut his teeth in London’s rough inner-city schools as a teacher before completing his PhD at the London School of Economics. Though of differing temperaments and, as Smith admits, not immediate kindred spirits, they soon discovered a shared “skepticism towards power and authority and a suspicion of fashionable convention,” forging a remarkable bond both as friends and writing partners.

David Martin Jones began his adult life as a “hippy Trotskyite,” but came to embrace libertarianism and, eventually, conservatism under the influence of his doctoral supervisor, the eminent Australian political theorist Kenneth Minogue. Jones was said to be Minogue’s favorite doctoral student, and Minogue, in turn, was the most significant intellectual influence on Jones. He would go on to marry Minogue’s stepdaughter, Jo Cohen Jones, who offers a moving reflection on her late husband’s intellectual journey in the book’s foreword: “To use one of David’s phrases, this journey meant walking backwards into history, not stumbling blindly forwards into a wishful dream world of biblical towers.”

Jones was a mesmerizing contradiction as a teacher of political theory. A denim-and leather-clad professor who never shied from grading harshly, shirking the inflated standards of the day, he assigned the magisterial (and, in Britain, rarely taught) History of Political Philosophy textbook edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey. Jones was supremely casual and disarmingly approachable, yet rigorous and exacting in the classroom. He possessed a wry sense of humor and kind green-grey eyes, which I now think back on as a window to an inner sadness I had failed to notice at the time I was his student.

Smith was the first to introduce expertise on violent non-state actors to the then-great-power-focused Department of War Studies in the 1990s, drawing on his research into the active conflict zone of Northern Ireland. His close engagement with the rhetoric of Irish republicanism proved formative in shaping his understanding of the often pernicious tactics and functions of international revolutionary movements. Today, Smith serves as Academic Principal of the Australian War College, where he continues to write widely on conflict-related issues for both scholarly journals and popular publications.

Jones’s plunging, insatiable drive to probe the fundamental questions of Western political thought—anchored in a deft command of philosophy from the classical world to the present—was well matched by Smith’s mastery of strategic theory and the history of war, both regular and irregular, along with his ceaseless wit. Intellectually and temperamentally, they complemented one another. Jones possessed a gentle charm and an affable, self-deprecating manner, tempered by a melancholic pessimism about the West’s future. Smith’s writing strikes a more optimistic note, marked by a winking humor and a fiercely independent, irreverent gaze, sustained by an enduring belief in truth and its power to illuminate.

From Stefan Zweig’s elegy for a broken Europe to Clausewitz’s lessons on the essence of war, the transparent failings of ASEAN, and the imperiled state of free expression in mainstream institutions, A Front Row Seat at the End of History surveys the dangers of “political moralism,” to borrow a phrase from Minogue, in both the domestic and foreign policies of the West. The essays open with the upheavals that rocked Southeast Asia in the late 1990s, confounding the triumphant proclamations of an “end of history” in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

In 1999, Jones and Smith embarked on a road trip from Singapore into Malaysia, where the highway’s “Touch ‘n Go” toll system struck them as an ironic allegory for the region’s economic prospects. They offered a sharply critical assessment of the aftermath of the 1997 financial crash, which had ruptured the prevailing “growth model” and coincided with rising ethno-religious tensions and the spread of a sophisticated Islamist terror network. The new Pacific regional order of the 1990s appeared to them as “a ramshackle edifice put together by ageing gerontocrats to legitimize their fading regimes.” The prospect of the democratization of illiberal regimes obscured deeper threats to regional stability, they argued. While the “end of history” thesis proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy and the disappearance of serious ideological rivals, Jones and Smith discerned a continuing clash between “modernity and tradition” that warred beneath the surface.

“Neither of us took a bullet in the throat for our moral principles like our literary hero, George Orwell,” Smith wrote. “Why, we thought, should anyone pay attention to the musings of a couple of wizened academics?” In Singapore, Jones and Smith attracted the attention of the city-state’s secret police after helping a fellow lecturer flee across the causeway to Malaysia following his public criticism of the island country’s judiciary. For his role in the escape, Jones was followed through cafés and restaurants, while Smith’s apartment came under surveillance.

Academics are rarely entangled in the affairs of intelligence services, and the episode left them under no illusion that a liberal commitment to free expression was not without cost. Yet they retained a residual admiration for Singapore’s efficiency and success as a modern regime. And, after all, it was there that their friendship was forged.

George Orwell decried the abuse of language at the heart of totalitarian systems—Jones and Smith observed it in the making of Western decline. Their post-9/11 writing probed both the rise of Islamist “death cults”—a term they helped to popularize—and the failure of Western policymakers to confront these acts as war. In the face of home-grown Islamist terrorists launching attacks across Britain and Europe at the height of the Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria, Smith and Jones warned of the dangers posed by “the slovenliness of our language.”

The term “radicalisation” entered mainstream British parlance as a catch-all explanation for why scores of Muslims in the West abandoned liberal comforts to wage jihad at home and abroad. Yet this linguistic slippage, they argued, concealed more than it revealed. Historically, radicalism referred to the distinctively modern reformist program developed by philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Today’s jihadists, by contrast, Jones and Smith maintained, were ultra-traditionalist zealots, drawing their worldview from scriptural literalism—the antithesis of the radical tradition.

As Clausewitz reminds us, war is the continuation of politics by other means—violence intended to compel an enemy to make political concessions. Smith and Jones repeatedly warned of the “strategy of savagery” employed by Islamist terrorist groups like ISIS, situating the “beatification of violence” and the “putrid need of death” not only in literalist religious interpretations, but also in the theatricality and symbolism of fascism’s “taste for political necrophilia.”

The failure to confront the domestic face of global terror was soon followed by a collective shock in the United States and Europe at the re-emergence of great power competition from Russia and China. Smith and Jones were not shocked and indeed had long warned of the West’s loss of geopolitical sentience after the end of the Cold War. They offered the commonsense observation that the so-called rules-based order is neither observed nor respected by the very adversaries it is meant to restrain. At the same time, they came to question the wisdom of post-9/11 Western military interventions and challenged the belief that counterinsurgency offers a foolproof formula for victory in future wars.

The book concludes with a chapter casting a “weary eye” over the fate of their native Britain, now in the hands of a managerial elite intent on steamrolling civil liberties and ignoring the warning signs of internal conflict. Their time spent living and teaching in Australia, at a great distance from Britain both practically and metaphysically, offered a vantage point from which to shrewdly observe the cultural malaise taking hold in the very birthplace of the liberal tradition. Unlike many British commentators concerned with the political consequences of contemporary illiberalism, Smith and Jones benefited from a degree of “emotional disinterestedness” as a result of this distance. They did not have to be over-committed to the victory of one side over another, and without a dog in the fight, they could concern themselves first and foremost with the truth.

With their expert grasp of the tactics underpinning Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, where culture war became an explicit political strategy, Jones and Smith highlight the fragility of freedom. Jones notes that “the Western political tradition rested on the rejection of despotism” and on the ability to distinguish between the public and private realms, thereby creating “a common world in which we may talk to each other,” as Minogue put it. That common world, they warn, is now in peril. Smith, despite an increasingly inhospitable climate, carved out a path as a principled maverick, rising to lead the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, until the walls closed in, and he felt compelled to leave. Jones’s path was even lonelier. He endured challenging periods of professional isolation and private anguish. As Smith movingly acknowledges, it was a quiet tragedy—for Jones saw too far, too soon.

Towards the end of the book, both Jones and Smith offer reflections on their personal backgrounds. In a moving essay about his father, Smith describes the hallmarks of a genuine freethinking spirit: “While he could be impetuous or contrarian, sometimes willing to argue his point into oblivion, ultimately, he accepted that his view was only ever provisional and could be contested with new or countervailing evidence.”

Jones, too, reflects affectionately on family, writing about the village of Abergynolwyn in Wales—the last home of his grandmother, Ellen, a figure of distinctive “nineteenth-century character.” Though recognized by UNESCO for its historic significance in the global export of slate, technology, and skilled labour—and as a model for quarry towns elsewhere—the village was, absurdly, subjected to a regime of self-reproach by local authorities, accused of historical links to the slave trade. Jones writes: “Ellen profited little from whatever connections the village had to the slave trade. In her will, she left only a Welsh dresser and, as a devoted member of the congregation of the Cwrt chapel, a Welsh bible, Y Beibl, which I still have among my possessions.”

This volume enables students of politics, and readers more broadly, to encounter the full force of the authors’ insight: elegant, often darkly funny, and marked always by moral clarity. Still, the shadow of what Jones, borrowing from Hobbes, called life’s “nasty, brutish, and short” nature is never far from view. Political orders dissolve, unions fracture, and private worlds unravel from unseen “distempers or diseases.” In 2024, Jones’s own life ended in suicide.

This collection of brave, lucid essays offers an enduring lesson. It remains imperative to speak honestly, to think freely, and to remain true to one’s convictions; to struggle constantly to see what is in front of our noses. Or, as Smith writes, drawing on Czech dissident Václav Havel, that we must strive to live in truth: “So long as that spirit survives, the possibilities for human salvation and regeneration, both personal and collective, will always remain.”