Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011, 528 pp. Reviewers ought not to begin apologetically. It undermines their credibility. Nonetheless, I feel diffidence in the face of Justice for Hedgehogs. It is an astonishing …
One of the greater oddities of British politics this winter has been the Labour Party’s travails over higher education. The government issued its White Paper on Higher Education in January 2003-“White Papers” are arcane BritSpeak for the publications in which …
Bertrand Russell was not the most successful of political prophets. If he had not died almost thirty years ago of extreme old age, he would surely have been astonished to see that humanity has not yet blown itself to bits. …
In Britain, the intellectual credibility of the third way is at its lowest ebb since the election of May 1997. Many commentators now declare that reality is catching up with a flawed idea. Harsher critics dismiss the suggestion that there …
The extraordinary thing about the Labour landslide on May 1 was that it was utterly predictable and utterly unexpected. Because Britain had been forced to retreat ignominiously from the exchange rate mechanism of the European Community in September 1992—devaluing the …
Democracy’s Discontent by Michael Sandel Harvard University Press, 1996. 417 pp. $24.95. Much of what follows will be rather critical of Michael Sandel’s new book. It would be particularly wicked therefore not to begin by praising some of its many …
This is an oddly depressing book. The oddity has little to do with its allegiances, more to do with its tone, its view of what is worth writing and thinking about, and its author’s conception of the human condition. It …
Here is a book that is easier to praise and to agree with than to review and to criticize. Its main theme is simple, right, and rather mysteriously neglected on all sides: the “culture wars” have been an enormous diversion …
What follows is something I feel uncomfortable writing, to some degree uncomfortable even thinking. Growing up on R.H. Tawney’s Equality, I have always believed that some form of egalitarianism-it may be hard to say just what form-is simply definitive of …
Although it cannot compare with the collapse of the theory and practice of Marxian socialism in intellectual interest or geopolitical significance, the current revival of interest in the life and work of John Dewey is an astonishing phenomenon. It is …
All too often, the kind of essay in political thought that hits the bookstores wearing the wrapper of a distinguished university press makes one’s heart sink. As an academic production it is often admirable. It usually adds at least a …
The Reagan era has bequeathed to us much, including, ironically, a new version of the materialist theory of the politics of culture. The essential claim of this theory is seductively simple: cultural expression reproduces, through all the appropriate “mediations,” the …
This may seem an odd time to be thinking about socialism in the 1990s and in the West. The collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe has been so much the most interesting political event of the 1980s, and …
What follows may sometimes sound an irritated note. I am sorry about that, but have to admit that it is one of the objects of this essay to express a certain irritation with the terms in which some recent debates …
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