Slavoj Žižek, the brilliant and prolific social theorist, named his book Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle after a joke analysed by Freud. Josh Cohen finds an ‘undeniably seductive charge’ in Žižek’s prose, but also, in his arguments, ‘a certain theoretical and …
Mr. Ivie, a Professor of Communications at Indiana University, here draws together a collection of essays united by several themes: the United States is a ‘distempered democracy,’ plagued by ‘demophobia,’ indeed nothing less than a ‘republic of fear.’ (Here, of …
This book is by Ted Honderich, the former Grote Professor of Logic at University College, London. It comes with a history – and, in this edition, it comes revised and with an ‘unrueful postscript.’ This is a shame, because Honderich …
An open letter to Tony Benn – Let Tariq Aziz rot in hell! Editor’s Note: We would like to bring the attention of readers to an Open Letter we have been sent by the Alliance for Workers Liberty, a British …
While others in his field feel the lure of lofty abstraction, Michael Walzer is a political philosopher who has made a point of working from the ‘ground up.’ The ground in question has shifted and expanded, his writings ranging across …
Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. Among her books are Just War Against Terror. The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (Basic Books, 2003), Jane …
With reform ferment in the Arab world, an emerging democracy in Iraq, and the colour-coded democratic revolutions in post-communist societies, a hitherto relatively obscure field of global civic activism has acquired political salience and strategic significance. The US administration’s renewed …
Editors: Engage (http://engageonline.wordpress.com/) was the rough and ready response to the Association of University Teachers (AUT) decision to support an effectively anti-Semitic academic intifada by boycotting some Israeli universities. It was set up within 48 hours. There was no intention …
‘Les extremes se touchent,’ goes a well-wrought French phrase. The value of this insight has not escaped a growing number of contemporary critics of what can be called a kind of marriage between postmodernism and religious fundamentalism. Recent writers like …
My Neighbor, My Enemy examines prevalent theoretical assumptions regarding the emotive issues of justice, reconciliation, accountability and community-relations after armed conflict. Setting the text apart is it’s questioning of the local impact of processes of international justice. As the editors …
Turn to the Politics section of a large bookshop in London and you will have no trouble finding ‘exposes’ of the post-September 11 world, and the Iraq war in particular. Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Michael Moore and Tariq Ali dominate …
The so-called ‘anti-war movement’ against the intervention of the US and its allies in Iraq has involved the forging of some peculiar new alliances, none of which is more incongruous than the alliance of radical Islamists, right-wing libertarians and radical …
Czeslaw Milosz’s poem Sarajevo begins with the lines ‘Now, when a revolution is really needed, those who were once fervent are cool / While a country, raped and murdered calls for help from the Europe it trusted / While statesmen …
