Last fall, Le Livre noir du Communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997, 850 pp.), a massive compendium of the crimes perpetrated by communist regimes created a public sensation in France and quickly became a bestseller. The controversy over …
Antipersonnel land mines epitomize the vulnerability and risk experienced by many inhabitants of the late modern world. The product of extraordinary scientific ingenuity and scrupulousness, conceived as an inexpensive and efficient means of controlling territory and constricting the movement of …
Fernando Rodríguez is clean shaven, but he makes a pulling motion under his chin as if he’s stroking a long beard.* It’s one of the many euphemisms Cubans use for Fidel Castro. “Este tozudo cumple setenta y dos años el …
As i was reading the advance proofs of David Miller’s article, the World Cup was being transmitted from France and shown on British television, to huge popular interest. This spectacle offered the choice of two different kinds of national identification. …
When Thailand devalued its currency in July 1997 it started a world financial crisis that continues to spin out of control. After a year of turbulence, what can we say about the crisis? Beware of experts. Before the crisis, money …
Jeffrey C. Isaac is a generous and provocative critic, yet I fear our disagreement may perplex some readers. He is right when he says that I still identify myself as “left” because of values—most simply, liberty, equality, solidarity. Where he …
One day, God decided that Saddam Hussein had caused enough harm and misery on Earth, and that it was time for Saddam to face the Creator. So God summoned Azrael, the angel of death, and told him to go down …
As the countries of the European Union (EU) move toward a common currency in the year 1999, jitters have gripped parts of the European left that see in this process the twilight of democratic popular sovereignty and the dawn of …
In “Literature and Science” (1883), a lecture delivered in America during the high noon of the Victorian culture wars, Matthew Arnold defended the study of Greek against utilitarian educational reformers and a newly assertive commercial class. “Literature may perhaps be …
Must avant-garde art manifest a radical aim? Does it require a collective identity? Is it the product of an “ideological community”? To each of these questions, Harold Rosenberg—coiner of the term “Action Painting” for the abstract art of de Kooning, …
This past summer the bones of Czar Nicholas II and his family, dug out of the basement in Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg in 1918), were solemnly reburied in St. Petersburg according to the rites of the Orthodox Church, with Boris Yeltsin, president …
Although Seyla Benhabib, Michael Rustin, and I seem to occupy contrasting positions on the European question, I am not sure how deep our differences really are. We agree that the EU is an important new departure in transnational cooperation, one …
At least once a day I hear myself saying some version of the following to my two daughters, ages ten and thirteen: “We didn’t have X when I was young.” Depending on the situation, the next sentence will be, “And …
In 1848, acccording to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “a specter [was] haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” In that same year, the upstate New York village of Seneca Falls hosted a gathering of fewer than three hundred people, earnestly debating …
My beach book this past summer was Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld. Near Asbury Park, on a beach that was eroding by the hour, where the emergency jetty was blown away and the surf rushed at us like a gang …
