Editor’s Note: The names of Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz should be better known than they are. Civil rights leader John Lewis certainly knew them. Recalling how the 1963 March on Washington was organised he said,‘I remember this young lady, …
Richard Kahlenberg’s biography of the teachers union leader Albert Shanker is a must read for unionists, educators, politicians and democracy internationalists trying to make sense of the persistent failings of U.S. education, the gnawing weaknesses of the Democratic Party and …
Most Americans, including university students, have been educated to believe that U.S. involvement with the Middle East began with the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1933 and developed further with the post-Second World War vicissitudes of Arab nationalism …
We’re here ‘cause Bush is a cavalier cowboy who doesn’t know when to cut his loses on a bad investment, the war here. Those who live inside the wire think we’re making a difference. Those who leave the wire on …
Growing up in Pakistan, Ibn Warraq ‘learned to read the Koran in Arabic without understanding a word of it – a common experience for thousands of Muslim children.’ [1] He discarded religious dogmas as soon as he was able to …
Two new books, Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God and Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason, argue that religious extremism imperils the liberal – and, as they see it, fragile – traditions of the West. Both books base much of their …
The long crisis of communism was a powerful impetus for the development of critical social theory, but critical social theory has not had much to say about the end of communism and what has followed in Eastern Europe and the …
In the final contribution in Confronting the New Conservatism, Stephen Bronner sets out how progressives and liberals (in the American sense) can challenge the Right. The Left, he argues, underestimated neoconservative ideology and can learn from the success of the …
‘I am not a man of letters,’ wrote Jawaharlal Nehru in one of his missives from jail to his daughter Indira, but of course he was. All through his life Nehru lost no opportunity to write. His words took the …
The ongoing explosion of books on terrorism and the global war on terror simultaneously adds to our understanding of the subject and reveals just how muddled much of our thinking is. The key terms: terror and the global war on …
Beginning in the late 1970s Edward Said, who had just bust out of scholarly obscurity with his publication of Orientalism, became the target of sharp and pointed criticisms from notable scholars such as Albert Hourani, Malcolm Kerr, Bernard Lewis, and …
In his pathbreaking (but pre-Internet) book After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre asks us to [i]magine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters [is] blamed by the general public on …
Not long ago, the President of one of America’s flagship universities was sitting with its top government affairs staffer, musing, for a change, about something other than fundraising and faculty recruitment. ‘Is it possible,’ asked the President, a liberal of …
Amaney Jamal’s concise and thought-provoking book stands in a long and somewhat depressing tradition in the study of political change. Since the late 1950s, when political scientists and area specialists began studying the development of state institutions and party systems …
A quick glance at the website promoting Nancy Sherman’s Stoic Warriors indicates an impressive list of television and radio interviews as well as dozens of talks at both military and academic venues that for most academic philosophers are the stuff …
