A small set of crucial human rights are valued, at least in theory, by all governments in the contemporary world. Rights against torture, murder, genocide, and slavery are simply not contested in the public rhetoric of the international arena. Of …
Bell never quite reconciled the Jewish conservative and the Yiddish radical within him. This tension helped generate some of his most important and creative insights.
Trump’s presidency may not bode the tyranny that many liberals fear. But we shouldn’t let his buffoonishness obscure the real danger that he represents.
French voters’ rebellion has not rewarded the left.
With this year’s elections, French politics has become less predictable than at any time since the founding of the Fifth Republic. It remains to be seen whether this volatility will reward the left—or the populist far right.
François Hollande has failed to provide voters with a credible alternative on issues of national security—a failure which has splintered the left and created a dangerous opening for the far-right.
Reckoning with the past is a struggle that should be constantly engaged in, and nowhere more than in universities, in regard to their own histories. Avoiding this struggle is not an acceptance of the past. It is, rather, a moral abdication.
It is crucial to avoid treating the Charlie Hebdo attacks as shots in a war waged on France.
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University Louis Menand W.W. Norton, 2010 Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities Martha C. Nussbaum Princeton University Press, 2010 IN 1922, Austrian art …
D. Bell Remembers Tony Judt
Can perestroika—the reconstruction of the Soviet economy—work? The shape of the world economy, in particular the relations of the advanced industrial societies to the markets of tomorrow, depends upon the answer to that question. I distinguish here between Eastern Europe—Poland, …
