The Marginalist

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
by Christopher Hitchens
Verso, 2000, 538 pp., $25

On the fifth floor of Harvard’s Lamont Library, near the men’s room, there is an old, well-thumbed volume of
Dwight Macdonald’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Halfway down page 39, in a 1945 essay called “The Responsibility of Peoples,” Macdonald argues that the Nazi death camps were uniquely anti-human. In the right margin, someone has commented, sniffily: “Fellow traveler McDonald neatly overlooks Comrade Stalin’s purges, where 2 x 10′ peopledied.”Your reviewer unsheathed his pen up...