Brooklyn College’s Corey Robin has a fascinating piece in the latest LRB about Hannah Arendt, treating three objections that Arendt, who was sympathetic to Zionism, formed in the ’40s to certain currents of Zionist ideology. Now that Israel has elevated to cabinet level a racist who supports expulsion of Arabs, Arendt’s Read More
More than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville detected in democracy a tendency toward despotism. Although it would degrade its citizens without tormenting them, democratic despotism might well be all-encompassing. Backed by the will of the majority, the government could become “the sole agent and the only arbiter” of status, success and happiness.
In the Read More
More than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville detected in democracy a tendency toward despotism. Although it would degrade its citizens without tormenting them, democratic despotism might well be all-encompassing. Backed by the will of the majority, the government could become “the sole agent and the only arbiter” of status, success and happiness.
In Read More
JERUSALEM, Israel—I’ve never been a war correspondent, and this failing has sometimes gnawed at me, say when I am watching Christiane Amanpour. Oh, I could do that, I think, and feel a little wave of inadequacy. Finally, my chance came: I’d traveled to Israel on a personal project, and war had begun in Lebanon and Read More
Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy , by Frances Kiernan. W.W. Norton & Company, 845 pages, $35.
Mary McCarthy was a tactician of scandal; she had a sure sense of just how much would be good for her. She learned this early on. In her freshman English class at Vassar, students’ papers were Read More
Perhaps now is the time. Perhaps the imminent publication of the diaries alleged to be Adolf Eichmann’s makes this the moment to put to rest one of the most pernicious and persistent misconceptions about Eichmann and the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust: the fashionable but vacuous cliché about the “banality of evil.” It’s remarkable how Read More
Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer , by Norman Podhoretz. Free Press, 244 pages, $25.
In all the trips I’ve made to the Strand bookstore, I don’t think I’ve ever failed to find at least one copy of Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 memoir, Making It Read More
