Following Tony Judt’s lecture two weeks back, NYU had a wine-and-cheese where I ran into a leftish Jewish journalist who felt guilty over Judt’s criticisms of the Jewish state. I ought to write about what is going on in Palestine, she said, but I don’t. It’s complicated, and you invite storms of invective by Read More
Does American Democracy Still Work? by Alan Wolfe. Yale University Press, 216 pages, $22.
Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles For a New Political Debate, by Ronald Dworkin. Princeton University Press, 192 pages, $19.95.
In his second inaugural address, President George W. Bush declared that supporting democracy—“the imperative of self-government”—is “the calling of Read More
Does American Democracy Still Work? by Alan Wolfe. Yale University Press, 216 pages, $22.
Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles For a New Political Debate, by Ronald Dworkin. Princeton University Press, 192 pages, $19.95.
In his second inaugural address, President George W. Bush declared that supporting democracy—“the imperative of self-government”—is “the calling of our time.” Standing Read More
Across the country, images from this summer’s early pop-culture hits are flickering in our heads. In one, a sinister plague has emptied Britain’s streets, and the survivors find military “protection” even more malevolent than the fast-moving zombies who have wiped out most of the population. In another, an adolescent wizard battles his own deceitful government, Read More
Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice , by Alan Wolfe. W.W. Norton, 256 pages, $24.95.
“We were about halfway through another interview,” writes the Boston College sociologist Alan Wolfe early in Moral Freedom, “before it became clear that the respondent did not know what the word ‘virtue’ meant and had Read More
The sociologist Alan Wolfe, who has just written a book, seems to have found a common belief system of the middle class, a kind of cool centrism that holds the country together despite the bombings of abortion clinics, the military games of the Christian identity groups, the race-tinted glasses we all wore during the O.J. Read More
Has there ever been a sweeter moment, O fans of irony in the rough, to read about “The Middle-Class Morality Project”? Alan Wolfe, a professor of sociology and political science at Boston University, used a grant from Manhattan’s Russell Sage Foundation to go find out what America’s middle class “really thinks.” He peppered with questions Read More
