The French political philosopher was both mouthpiece and model for the best defense of liberalism. Paul T. Wilford, Ethan Cutler March 01, 2024 NB: The final paragraph of this review contains these lines: ‘As Mark Lilla notes in his preface to Aron’s lecture, the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine may be a wake-up call: “Sometimes it… Read More Raymond Aron’s Liberal Virtues
Lord Acton writes to Bishop Creighton in a series of letters (1887) concerning the moral problem of writing history about the Inquisition. Acton believes that the same moral standards should be applied to all men, political and religious leaders included, especially since, in his famous phrase, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”: I… Read More Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility: Lord Acton
Marshall Berman (1940-2013) A new beginning for Marxism might just be on the horizon of a landscape despoiled by Soviet communism and a now wobbling world capitalism. The attention attracted by the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto included laudatory references to Marx in venues as unexpected as The New York Times and The New… Read More Marshall Berman: Adventures in Marxism
By Gregory Freidin Great musicians, it is said, do not choose their calling—music chooses them. Reading and rereading Joseph Frank’s writings after his passing, it seems that the spirit of modernity itself chose him to be its voice among literary critics—in the age when brute force remaking the world was matched and animated by a… Read More A Critic, His Life, His Age: A Tribute to Joseph Frank (1918-2013)
Our Palestine Question, an explosive new book by Geoffrey Levin, delves into American Jewish McCarthyism from the 1950s through late 1970s GAZA casualties live statistics United Nations Documentation on the Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem Debbie Nathan THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT covertly meddled into American Jewish politics from the 1950s to 1970s, and they did… Read More How Israel quietly crushed early American Jewish dissent on Palestine
There are some who are in darkness / And the others are in lightAnd you see the ones in brightness / Those in darkness drop from sight.(Bertold Brecht, The Threepenny Opera) People in the West seem naïve to us because they don’t suffer like we do, they have a remedy for every little pimple. We’re… Read More Svetlana Alexievich: Secondhand Time
First posted June 07, 2016 The astonishing story of the uproar in Egypt over the publication of a Syrian novel set in Algeria—a work of literature as trigger for political crisis and polemical turmoil, two decades after it was written, in a landscape completely transformed. Haydar Haydar’s fiction as tuning-fork of stark dissonances of time… Read More Sabry Hafez: the Novel, Politics and Islam – Haydar Haydar’s Banquet for Seaweed
Jack Guy, CNN Karl Marx once gifted a signed copy of “Das Kapital” to scientist Charles Darwin, but the book remained largely unread, providing an “amusing insight” into the dynamics between these two intellectuals, according to experts. In “Das Kapital,” economist and philosopher Marx explored how the capitalist system works and, he argued, its tendencies toward… Read More Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ gift to Darwin
First posted September 17, 2012 “War begins in the mind, with the idea of the enemy” NB: John Mack (1929 – 2004) was an immensely insightful psychiatrist, and this essay is an example of the contemporary relevance of his ideas and his research. A short biography may be read here. DS There is a substantial,… Read More John Mack: The Enemy System
Hegel’s World Revolutions; Richard Bourke An absolute will is bound to be an arbitrary one, since it would cease to be absolute if it respected laws and moral imperatives. The mere existence of something other than itself poses a mortal threat to it, and it ends up crushing everything that moves. Hegel sees the revolution… Read More Seeds of What Ought to Be: Hegel’s World Revolutions
After the truth-shower 