Articles on Man, State and Society [Archive] - Uzbekistan Online Forum - Онлайн Форум Узбекистана

Iqbol

01-28-2007, 11:32 AM

International Humanitarianism: The Dark Sides

David Kennedy
David Kennedy is the Manley Hudson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. This article introduces themes developed in his book The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2004).
I. Introduction

In the American foreign affairs tradition, the word “humanitarian” signals at least five important commitments:

First, a commitment to engagement with the world, engagement by our government, and, perhaps more important, engagement by our citizenry.

Second, a commitment to multilateralism and intergovernmental institutions.

Third, a renunciation of power politics, militarism, and the aspiration to empire.

Fourth, a commitment to moral idealism and projects of ethical, spiritual, and political betterment for other nations and the world—projects of moral uplift, religious conversion, economic development, and democracy. And finally, a commitment to cosmopolitanism—attitudes of tolerance, moderation of patriotism, and respect for other cultures and nations—an aspiration that we might rise above whatever cultural differences divide our common humanity.

At this quite general level, these are commitments shared by our allies in European international law, in the world of international human rights, and in the broad United Nations system. These are noble ideas. Yet the history of their transformation into international legal regimes is complex, and made more so by the tensions among these commitments, tensions that leave those who espouse them uneasy about the exercise of power and leadership in the world.

My intention here is to explore some of the difficulties that arise when humanitarian sentiments like these are transformed into legal and institutional projects in human rights, efforts to humanize global trade, and a century of humanitarian efforts to limit the violence and frequency of warfare. My basic argument is this: humanitarians are conflicted—seeking to engage the world, but renouncing the tools of power politics and embracing a cosmopolitan tolerance of foreign cultures and political systems. These conflicts have gotten built into the tools—the United Nations, the human rights movement, the law of force—that humanitarians have devised for influencing foreign affairs.

As a result, we humanitarians have a hard time acknowledging our own participation in rulership, preferring to think of ourselves off to one side speaking truth to power, or hidden in the policy apparatus advising other people, the princes, to humanize their means and ends. We commonly chalk any doubts up to the weaknesses of the humanitarian tradition—a meek David facing the Goliath of foreign policy establishments in a harsh world of power politics.

But humanitarians increasingly provide the terms in which global power is exercised. We speak the same language as those who plan and fight wars, the language of humanitarian objectives and proportional, even humane means. Our legal and professional terminology has seeped into popular parlance—collateral damage, rules of engagement, humanitarian intervention, self-defense, collective security—and has become the vocabulary of governance.

To be responsible partners in global governance, humanitarians need to face the dark sides of our humanitarian tradition by acknowledging costs that can sometimes swamp our activism and policy-making efforts. But our hesitation to see ourselves as powerful, as rulers, makes it difficult to look honestly at the consequences of our work and to take responsibility for the damage we sometimes do.

Before turning to war, I’d like to look briefly at two quite familiar global humanitarian projects: the human rights movement, and efforts to soften the impact of global trade through the adoption of global labor and other social standards.

II. International Human Rights

Let me start by stressing that the human rights movement has unquestionably done a great deal of good, freeing individuals from great harm and raising the standards by which governments are judged. The human rights tradition makes a series of promises:

to engage individuals directly, as activists and as victims, giving a global voice to individual pleas for justice;

to give the nongovernmental institutions of civil society a voice on the global stage, establishing, if you will, a humanitarian profession;

and, most important, to establish a universal vocabulary for ethics—a value orientation for international law and foreign affairs.

These are enormously appealing ideas, but when translated into governance, they also create costs. Human rights professionals I have known rarely place these costs center stage, where they can be assessed and either refuted or taken into account. We discuss the dark sides only privately, often cynically, rarely strategically. Let me offer a brief list of the sort of costs I have in mind.

I worry that the international human rights movement can occupy the field, crowding out other ways of pursuing social justice and other emancipatory vocabularies that may sometimes be more effective, such as religious vocabularies, local traditions, and tools focused more directly on economic justice or social solidarity. There are lots of ways to pursue social justice. Human rights is but one, and not always the most appropriate.

I worry, moreover, that human rights, given its origins, its spokesmen, its preoccupations, has often been a vocabulary of the center against the periphery, a vehicle for empire rather than an antidote to empire.

It is nothing new to point out how narrowly the human rights tradition views human emancipation by focusing on what governments do to individuals, on participatory rather than economic or distributive issues, and on legal rather than social, religious, or other remedies. Problems that are hard to formulate as rights claims for individuals—collective problems, economic problems, problems of poverty or health—are easy to overlook.

Emancipating people as rights holders, moreover, stresses their individual claims, their personal relationship with the state. This can encourage a politics of queue-jumping among the disadvantaged, propagating attitudes of victimization and entitlement while making cross-alliances and solutions that involve compromise and sharing more difficult.

I am concerned that human rights often excuses government behavior by setting standards below which mischief seems legitimate. It can be easy to sign a treaty and then do what you want. But even compliance may do more harm than good: a well-implemented ban on the death penalty, for example, can easily leave the general conditions of incarceration unremarked.

Human rights criticism can get us into things that we are not able to follow through on, such as by triggering interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and even Iraq with humanitarian promises that it cannot deliver. The universal vocabulary of human rights can seem to promise the existence of an “international community” that is simply not available.

By defining justice as a relationship to the state rather than simply a condition in society, human rights can distract our attention from background norms and economic conditions that often do far more damage. Focus on the very real problems of refugees, for example, can make it more difficult to contest the closure of borders to economic migration.

Perhaps most disturbing, the international human rights movement often acts as if it knows what justice means, always and for everyone; all you need to do is adopt, implement, and interpret these rights. But justice is not like that. People must build it anew each time, struggle for it, imagine it in new ways.

Of course human rights professionals worry about these things, but they are terribly difficult to take into account, to weigh and balance against the real upsides of human rights work.

It can be all too easy to say "let us at least begin." Normally, of course, such an attitude in government would be completely irresponsible. Imagine a proposed road. It will contribute to national welfare by creating jobs, improving traffic flow, and stimulating economic growth. But before the government builds the first mile, we expect it also to look into the costs of the endeavor, such as lost homes, neighborhoods, increasing sprawl, and environmental damage. Only when officials have done so, when the choices have been squarely faced and democratically made, do we expect the project to proceed.

The attitude “let us at least begin” is possible only if we blind ourselves to the exercise of power, the governing, that the human rights activist or the policymaker does, and if we deny that we have any responsibility to take costs into account. Yet when human rights initiatives succeed, when the movement gains power in the world, when our advocacy has an effect, we invariably create winners and losers. And human rights can be intoxicating precisely because it often works. Human rights has succeeded in becoming a vocabulary of power, a tool not only for a global village of NGOs, but also for George W. Bush, the World Trade Organization, and Texaco.

to continue (http://www.icnl.org/JOURNAL/vol6iss3/ar_kennedy.htm)

Iqbol

01-28-2007, 11:35 AM

Challengin the expert rule: Politics of global governance" (http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/dkennedy/publications/JuliusStone.pdf)
David Kennedy
In my Julius Stone Memorial Address, I explored the hypothesis that everyday
decisions made by the professionals who manage norms and institutions which
seem to lie in the background of global politics may be more important to global
wealth and poverty than what we customarily think of as the big political and
economic decisions made by parliaments and presidents or brought about by war
and peace. If you have the energy to protest, criticise and change the distribution
of wealth and status in our newly globalised world, it can be hard to locate points
at which allocative decisions can be politically contested. The urgent political
disputes that become international front-page news can seem peripheral to the
decisions responsible for the distribution of things in the world. Although
meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the G–7 (Group of Seven)
provide useful backdrops for street protest and media attention, it is not clear that
the decisions being taken inside those meeting rooms are either meaningfully
responsible for global distributions of wealth and power or contestable in
conventional political terms. Although it is easy to think of international affairs
as a rolling sea of politics over which we have managed to throw but a thin net of
legal rules, in truth the situation today is more the reverse. There is law at every
turn — and only the most marginal opportunities for engaged political
contestation. The footprint of national rules and national adjudication extends far
beyond their nominal territorial jurisdiction. Private ordering, standards bodies,
financial institutions and payment systems, tax systems, trade regimes — all are
managed by legal expertise. Indeed, to say the world is covered in law is also to
say we are increasingly governed by experts — legal experts. Even the story of
the war in Iraq is overwhelmingly one of law, of military force mobilised,
coordinated and legitimated by law. The difficulty is to understand more
adequately what these experts do, the nature and limits of their vocabulary, and
the possibilities for translating their work into politically contestable terms — or
promoting the experience of responsible human freedom among the experts who
govern our world.

Iqbol

01-28-2007, 11:39 AM

The International Human Rights Movement - part of the Problem? (http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/dkennedy/publications/humanrights.pdf)
David Kennedy

MUHLIS

01-29-2007, 06:03 AM

Bien nice job. I like reading such stuff, but is it possible to post the text in here? Because I could not open most of the links you provided.
Thanks.

Iqbol

01-29-2007, 11:24 AM

Bien nice job. I like reading such stuff, but is it possible to post the text in here? Because I could not open most of the links you provided.
Thanks.

Thanks Muhlis.
I would post whole texts with pleasure. But unfortunately the attachment limit is only 1 mb while usual PDF file articles exceeds this limit by far. I had asked for excdeption a long long time ago so that I could attach many articles that i wanted to post. But, I am still waiting...

Iqbol

01-29-2007, 11:27 AM

Muhlis, here is the word version of
"International Humanitarianism: The Dark Sides"
by David Kennedy

Iqbol

01-30-2007, 07:46 AM

An interesting article on "Appearance and Reality in Politics" by Willian Connolly, one of the most outstanding political scientists.

William E. Connolly is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for having applied conceptual analysis with a left-critical edge to social science concepts, and for introducing postmodern philosophy into political theory. He is also known for having published The Terms of Political Discourse, which is widely held to be one of the major works of political theory published in the 1970s. It was published in 1974 and is still in print.

He received his PhD from University of Michigan, and has taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He edited the journal Political Theory in the 1980s. He has been teaching at Hopkins since 1985.

With his colleague and interlocutor Richard E. Flathman, Connolly founded what is sometimes called "the Hopkins School" of political theory.
from wikipedia

MUHLIS

01-31-2007, 06:11 AM

Iqbol

01-31-2007, 10:53 AM

Bien,
Thanks for the links. They are working allright now. I am now reading Fareed Zakariya's "Illeberal Democracy". Nice piece, really. I have read some works of this great writer before. But honestly, this one came as a little surpirise since I have known him as a journalist on Newsweek until I came across with this article which looks scholary than journalistic.

Indeed the article you are reading is the one that established him as a popular scholar and, I presume, helped him to get his current status in media.
Fareed Zakaria has been, before launching into public media, a brilliant International Relations scholar. He is characterized as the adherent and one of the initial eminent members of Offensive Realism school. His PhD thesis was published under the title "From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role" and considerd one of the masterpieces of early offensive realism.
And the article on illiberal democracy is drawn from his another successful book: Future of Freedom Illiberal democracy home and abroad

Iqbol

01-31-2007, 11:13 AM

Fareed Zakaria

Dr. Fareed Zakaria is the editor of the Newsweek International edition and a pundit on International affairs. His column appears in Newsweek, Newsweek International and often the Washington Post, making it one of the most widely circulated columns of its kind in the world.

Mr. Zakaria was born in India to a Muslim family. His mother, Fatima Zakaria, was the editor of the Sunday Times in India. His father, Rafiq Zakaria, was an Islamic scholar, governor of Mahrasthra for a period under Indira Gandhi, and was one of the country's better known political writers; writing on India, Islam, and British Imperialism. His brother, Arshad, is head of investment banking and former VP at Merrill Lynch in New York.

Dr. Zakaria began studying at a private primary school in Bombay. Though his family were practicing Muslims, Dr. Zakaria and his brother attended a diverse British Anglican school of 800 Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims where each day began with everyone singing Christian hymns, and he celebrated Hindu and Muslim holidays. It was here that Dr. Zakaria supposedly received a crash course in Western culture (though he'd get a lot more by later going to universities in America) and began to develop a keen sensitivity to the differences that exist between the Islamic and Western worlds.

He used to be a Reaganite, claiming he became a conservative just from watching the Indian state. "People often say, `How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?' Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don't understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed. The second is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask." He has now moved to a more centrist position politically.

He became interested in politics while he was earning his BA at Yale. He earned his PhD in political science at Harvard University where he taught international relations and political philosophy in Harvard University's Department of Government. In the 1990's, he moved up in stature in the foreign-policy arena; The Nation once described him as a "junior Kissinger." Interestingly, and they did meet and Henry Kissinger was apparently impressed by him and had a "scintillating" time by Zakaria's account.

"Every time something blows up, we have you on the show to tell us why."--Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, July 2005

His real big break occurred when he wrote the 7000-word Newsweek cover story "Why They Hate Us" after September 11, 2001. At the time, the country was awash with knee-jerk reactions that simply blamed Islam, or religious intolerance blamed on "Muslim" extremists. It was the uneven path of globalization, especially in modernizing Arab aristocracies, Zakaria wrote, that stoked the homicidal rage. The Arabs had grasped the wrong end of the global stick, importing the vapidity of Western culture but raising walls against its ennobling influences--a formula for an explosion. "They see the television shows, the fast foods, and the fizzy drinks," Zakaria opined. "But they don't see genuine liberalization in the society, with increased opportunities and greater openness. As a result, the people . . . can look at globalization but for the most part not touch it."

"Widely read, widely photocopied, widely envied," says New Yorker editorial director Henry Finder. The essay echoed across the country in unexpected places. Rear admirals at the Pentagon made it recommended reading for US troops. He was invited on shows like The View and The Daily Show, and bantered with people like Ted Koppel and Jon Stewart.

His thoughtful critiques on the Bush Administration's efforts in Iraq made him rise to prominence in the mainstream media. (He initially supported the idea of liberation through invasion, but changed his tune within a few weeks, criticizing the Bush administration in Newsweek pieces with titles like "The Arrogant Empire.") Lately he has become a popular occasional guest on The Daily Show.

At the age of 28, he became the youngest managing editor in the history of Foreign Affairs, the leading journal of international politics and economics. That brought Dr. Zakaria to New York, where he continued building his reputation writing op-eds for the New York Times and where, in 2000, he became editor of Newsweek International. Lately over the last few years, he has become a sort of media bridge to the Muslim world, articulately saying some of the objections the Muslim world has with American policy (though he doesn't let them off easy either).

He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal. He offers political analysis on ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopolis, and has appeared on programs like "Firing Line," "The News Hour" with Jim Lehrer and "Meet the Press." He edited the book American Encounter, authored From Wealth to Power, and most recently published The Future of Freedom, Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. He's won many awards from organizations like The Overseas Press Club, The National Press Club and The Deadline Club. In 1999, Esquire named him one of the 21 most important people in the 21st century.

Currently, he is hosting a international affairs TV show called Foreign Exchange. He often has non-American guests on the show, and offers a wide range of international topics. He lives in New York City with his wife; a Harvard MBA jewelry business-owner, his son and his daughter.

I will mention that a lot of people don't like Fareed Zakaria. He is "politically conservative," but that can mean a lot. Plenty of Muslims don't like him, calling him a "chamcha" which is a derogatory Urdu word for a toady. People consider him traitorous for supporting policies like the Iraq war, racist "homeland security" practices, etc. that marginalize his fellow minority citizens, especially when anti-minority media biases and popular misperceptions are omnipresent (e.g. common misbelief of an Al Qaeda - Hussein link). He was the one who was advocating that U.S. should go to war with Iraq just to save the prestige. ("If we have threatened Saddam with military actions, or else our prestige is at stake.") He's also hated for appearing too conciliatory towards Bush, despite his change of heart concerning Iraq, and criticizing the East more than the West. Who knows, maybe he's hoping for a cabinet position, I heard an unprovable accusation that he used plenty of pro-Bush rhetoric around the last two US elections in the hopes he'd be offered a job. By and large, he defines himself as a Muslim, but basically he disagrees with a wide swath of the Muslim community in America on certain political issues.

"By and large, there is a suspicion that I'm betraying my roots, whatever that means," Zakaria says. "The only way I can respond is to say I've simply never been defined by religious identity, so I can't be defined by that now just because it has come into the question."

Bob Woodward wrote in his book, State of Denial, that Paul Wolfowitz tapped Dr. Zakaria for a position on an elite secret group formed to advise the White House "well into the Afghanistan bombing campaign," and likely as the precursor to Iraq.

To be fair, he also calls the US government on its mistakes. In March 2003, the week the bombing started, Zakaria let loose a long and pointed Newsweek cover story called "Why America Scares the World." The essay openly criticized the Bush administration for its failure to conduct diplomacy and attempt--or even pretend to attempt--to build an international consensus for our action in the Gulf. "The point is to scare our enemies," he admonished in his essay, "not terrify the rest of the world.":

"Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq (troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani) Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world."
One online poster said it's not that he's pro-Bush or anti-Bush, but he makes a mistake in assuming the elite of Muslim countries will be able to effectively modernize their nations. In The Future of Freedom, he had a short piece that Pakistani President Musharraf was the better than any of the politicians currently in Pakistan (which I disagree with, but I'm sure he's better than both Mia Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. If you were able to understand that, I'm impressed by your foreign knowledge skills, or you're Pakistani, or both. ).
He is reported to be a neoconservative. Or maybe he's a neoliberal since he likes globalization like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.

"If I could change one thing about American foreign policy, what would it be? The answer is easy, but it's not something most of us think of as foreign policy. I would adopt a serious national program geared toward energy efficiency and independence. Reducing our dependence on oil would be the single greatest multiplier of American power in the world."
Author of books:
Strong Nation, Weak State: The Rise of America to World Power (1998)
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2003)

Iqbol

01-31-2007, 11:54 AM

From world system to world society
PS. Alas, this kind of discussions are almost absent within our community

Iqbol

02-06-2007, 07:22 AM

Some articles by Quentin Skinner,
one of the prominent specialists of Modern History and History of Political Ideas.

Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner (born 26 November 1940) is Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University.

He will be a distinguished visiting professor in the humanities at Queen Mary, University of London, in the 2007-2008 academic year and will be professor in the humanities at Queen Mary beginning the 2008-2009 academic year [1]

[edit] Biography
Quentin Skinner was born the second son of Alexander Skinner, CBE (died 1979), and Winifred Rose Margaret, née Duthie (died 1982). Educated at Bedford School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he was elected into a Research Fellowship there in 1961 upon obtaining a double-starred first in History, and in 1962 into a teaching Fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he has been ever since. He is now also an Honorary Fellow of Caius.

In the middle 1970s he spent three formative years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, initially as an historian and latterly in the School of Social Science. In 1978 he was appointed to the chair of Political Science at Cambridge University, and in 1996 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge by Her Majesty the Queen. He was pro-vice-chancellor of Cambridge University in 1999. In 1979 he married Susan Deborah Thorpe James, daughter of Prof. Derrick James, of London; they have a daughter and a son.

[edit] Achievement
Skinner's historical writings have been characterised by an interest in recovering the ideas of Early Modern and previous political writers. This has been spread over Renaissance republican authors (see The Foundations of Modern Political Thought [1978]), the 'pre-Humanist' dictatores of later medieval Italy, through Machiavelli, and more recently (in Liberty before Liberalism, 1998) the English republicans of the mid-seventeenth century (including John Milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney). The work of the 1970s and 1980s was in good part directed towards writing an account of the history of the modern idea of the state. In more recent publications he has preferred the more capacious term 'neo-Roman' to 'republican'.

He is generally regarded as one of the two principal members of the influential 'Cambridge School' of the study of the history of political thought. The other principal member of this school is the historian J. G. A. Pocock, whose The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957) was a significant early influence. Another important stimulus came from the work of Peter Laslett, and more particularly from Laslett's decisive edition of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1966).

The 'Cambridge School' is best known for its attention to the 'languages' of political thought[2]. Skinner's particular contribution was to articulate a theory of interpretation which concentrated on recovering the author's intentions in writing classic works of political theory (Machiavelli, Thomas More, and Thomas Hobbes have been continuing preoccupations). This theory was initially presented in terms of speech act theory. One of the consequences of this account of interpretation is an emphasis on the necessity of studying less well-known political writers as a means of shedding light on the classic authors. A further consequence has been an attack on the uncritical assumption that political classics are monolithic and free-standing. In its earlier versions this added up to an attack on the approach of an older generation, particularly on that of Leo Strauss.

Skinner's longstanding concern with the speech acts of political writing helps explain his turn at the beginning of the 1990s towards the role of neo-classical rhetoric in early modern political theory, which resulted in his study of Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996). Neo-classical rhetoric can be regarded as a form of early modern speech act theory.

More recently, he has turned to the classic preoccupation of Cambridge Regius Professors (not least Lord Acton), the history of liberty. The history of theories of political representation has been an offshoot of this interest.

In a significant development of his earlier and biting critiques of anachronism in the history of ideas, he now advances the view that one purpose of studying the history of political thought is to excavate past ideas in order to reassert their potential importance in modern political debate. Nevertheless, at one point he wrote that we moderns must "do more thinking on our own."

[edit] Principal publications
"Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas", History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 3 – 53
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1978)
Machiavelli (Oxford University Press (Past Masters series), 1981; reissued as Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction)
The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Editor and contributor; Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (1988), ed. James Tully
"The State", in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson (1989), pp. 90 – 131
Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
"A Third Concept of Liberty", Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002), pp. 237 – 268
Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Iqbol

02-06-2007, 07:24 AM

Some more articles from Quentin Skinner

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:07 AM

A Mission to Convert
By H. Allen Orr

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin, 406 pp., $27.00

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
by Lewis Wolpert
Norton, 243 pp., $25.95

Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist
by Joan Roughgarden
Island, 151 pp., $14.95

Scientists' interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Another followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the controversy surrounding intelligent design.

During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary, psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the last few months, three prominent scientists—all biologists—have published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length below.

Lewis Wolpert, an eminent developmental biologist at University College London, has just published Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a pleasant, though rambling, look at the biological basis of belief. While the book focuses on our ability to form causal beliefs about everyday matters (the wind moved the trees, for example), it spends considerable time on the origins of religious and moral beliefs. Wolpert defends the unusual idea that causal thinking is an adaptation required for tool-making. Religious beliefs can thus be seen as an odd extension of causal thinking about technology to more mysterious matters. Only a species that can reason causally could assert that "this storm was sent by God because we sinned." While Wolpert's attitude toward religion is tolerant, he's an atheist who seems to find religion more puzzling than absorbing.
to continue (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:11 AM

Who Was Milton Friedman?
By Paul Krugman
1.
The history of economic thought in the twentieth century is a bit like the history of Christianity in the sixteenth century. Until John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936, economics—at least in the English-speaking world—was completely dominated by free-market orthodoxy. Heresies would occasionally pop up, but they were always suppressed. Classical economics, wrote Keynes in 1936, "conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain." And classical economics said that the answer to almost all problems was to let the forces of supply and demand do their job.

But classical economics offered neither explanations nor solutions for the Great Depression. By the middle of the 1930s, the challenges to orthodoxy could no longer be contained. Keynes played the role of Martin Luther, providing the intellectual rigor needed to make heresy respectable. Although Keynes was by no means a leftist—he came to save capitalism, not to bury it—his theory said that free markets could not be counted on to provide full employment, creating a new rationale for large-scale government intervention in the economy.

Keynesianism was a great reformation of economic thought. It was followed, inevitably, by a counter-reformation. A number of economists played important roles in the great revival of classical economics between 1950 and 2000, but none was as influential as Milton Friedman. If Keynes was Luther, Friedman was Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. And like the Jesuits, Friedman's followers have acted as a sort of disciplined army of the faithful, spearheading a broad, but incomplete, rollback of Keynesian heresy. By the century's end, classical economics had regained much though by no means all of its former dominion, and Friedman deserves much of the credit.

to continue (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19857)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:13 AM

Iraq: The War of the Imagination
By Mark Danner
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., $30.00

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
by Ron Suskind
Simon and Schuster, 367 pp., $27.00

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration
by James Risen
Free Press, 240 pp., $26.00

Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.
—George F. Kennan,September 26, 2002[1]
I ask you, sir, what is the American army doing inside Iraq?... Saddam's story has been finished for close to three years.
—President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Mike Wallace on Sixty Minutes, August 13, 2006-
In the ruined city of Fallujah, its pale tan buildings pulverized by Marine artillery in the two great assaults of this long war (the aborted attack of March 2004 and then the bloody, triumphant al-Fajr (The Dawn) campaign of the following November), behind the lines of giant sandbags and concrete T-walls and barbed wire that surrounded the tiny beleaguered American outpost there, I sat in my body armor and Kevlar helmet and thought of George F. Kennan. Not the grand old man of American diplomacy, the ninety-eight-year-old Father of Containment who, listening to the war drums beat from a Washington nursing home in the fall of 2002, had uttered the prophetic words above. I was thinking of an earlier Kennan, the brilliant and ambitious young diplomat who during the late 1920s and 1930s had gazed out on the crumbling European order from Tallinn and Berlin and Prague and read the signs of the coming world conflict.

For there in the bunkered Civil-Military Operations Center (known as the C-Moc) in downtown Fallujah, where a few score Marines and a handful of civilians subsisted in a broken-down bunkered building without running water or fresh food, I met young Kennan's reincarnation in the person of a junior State Department official: a bright, aggressive young man who spent his twenty-hour days rumbling down the ruined streets in body armor and helmet with his reluctant Marine escorts, meeting with local Iraqi officials, and writing tart cables back to Baghdad or Washington telling his bosses the truth of what was happening on the ground, however reluctant they might be to hear it. This young diplomat was resourceful and brilliant and indefatigable, and as I watched him joking and arguing with the local sheikhs and politicos and technocrats —who were meeting, as they were forced to do, in the American bunker —I thought of the indomitable young Kennan of the interwar years, and of how, if the American effort in Iraq could ever be made to "work," only undaunted and farseeing young men like this one, his spiritual successor, could make it happen.

to continue (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19720)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:19 AM

Russia’s Managed Democracy
Perry Anderson

Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries – Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an impotent ombudsman – had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier. Around the edges of the mortuary chamber, garlands from the media that attacked her while she was alive stood thick alongside wreaths from her children and friends, the satisfied leaf to leaf with the bereaved. Filing past them and out into the cemetery beyond, virtually no one spoke. Some were in tears. People dispersed in the drizzle as quietly as they came.

The authorities had gone to some lengths to divert Anna Politkovskaya’s funeral from the obvious venue of the Vagankovskoe, where Sakharov is buried, to a dreary precinct on the outskirts that few Muscovites can locate on a map. But how necessary was the precaution? The number of mourners who got to the Troekurovskoe was not large, perhaps a thousand or so, and the mood of the occasion was more sadness than anger. A middle-aged woman, bringing groceries home from the supermarket, shot at point-blank range in an elevator, Politkovskaya was killed for her courage in reporting the continuing butchery in Chechnya. An attempt to poison her had narrowly failed two years earlier. She had another article in press on the atrocities of the Kadyrov clan that now runs the country for the Kremlin, as she was eliminated. She lived and died a fighter. But of any powerful protest at her death, it is difficult to speak. She was buried with resignation, not fury or revolt.

In Ukraine, the discovery of the decapitated body of a journalist who had investigated official corruption, Georgi Gongadze, was sufficient outrage to shake the regime, which was brought down soon afterwards. Politkovskaya was a figure of another magnitude. A better historical comparison might be with the murder of Matteotti by Mussolini in 1924. In Russian circumstances, her moral stature as an opponent of arbitrary power was scarcely less than that of the Socialist deputy. But there the resemblance ends. The Matteotti Affair caused an outcry that nearly toppled Mussolini. Politkovskaya was killed with scarcely a ripple in public opinion. Her death, the official media explained, was either an unfathomable mystery, or the work of enemies of the government vainly attempting to discredit it. The president remarked she was a nobody whose death was the only news value in her life.

It is tempting, but would be a mistake, to see in that casual dismissal no more than the ordinary arrogance of power. All governments deny their crimes, and most are understanding of each other’s lies about them. Bush and Blair, with still more blood on their hands – in all probability, that of over half a million Iraqis – observe these precepts as automatically as Putin. But there is a difference that sets Putin apart from his fellow rulers in the G8, indeed from virtually any government in the world. On the evidence of comparative opinion polls, he is the most popular national leader alive today. Since he came to power six years ago, he has enjoyed the continuous support of over 70 per cent of his people, a record no other contemporary politician begins to approach. For comparison, Chirac now has an approval rating of 38 per cent, Bush of 36 per cent, Blair of 30 per cent.

to continue (http://lrb.co.uk/v29/n02/ande01_.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:21 AM

Bush’s Useful Idiots
Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America
Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

It wasn’t always so. On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’

to continue (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/judt01_.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:23 AM

Neo-Con Futurology
Stephen Holmes

After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama · Profile, 226 pp, Ј12.99

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Francis Fukuyama signed an open letter arguing that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was essential to ‘the eradication of terrorism’, even if Saddam were revealed to have had no connection to al-Qaida and no hand in the attack. At that time, in other words, and alongside neo-con celebrities such as Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, Fukuyama was beating the drum for a ‘shift in focus from al-Qaida to Iraq’. He now expresses qualms about the killing of ‘tens of thousands’ of innocent Iraqis who had done nothing to harm America or its inhabitants: ‘These casualties in a country we were seeking to help represent an enormous human cost.’ Such guarded words of regret will strike most readers as welcome and overdue. To unrepentant apologists of the war, by contrast, they have the feel of apostasy and betrayal.

The question is: does Fukuyama tell us anything that we don’t already know? Can he explain how ‘the irresponsible exercise of American power’ became ‘one of the chief problems in contemporary politics’? Can he help us understand how ‘so experienced a foreign policy team’ could make ‘such elementary blunders’? Can he indeed tell us why the administration decided to do what he and his former allies had encouraged them to do: namely, to transform Saddam’s isolated dictatorship into a central battlefront in the global war on terror? This is the essential issue because, as Fukuyama now admits, the Iraq war has ‘unleashed a maelstrom’, inflaming the anti-American extremism it was ostensibly launched to quell.

As it turns out, Fukuyama’s book sheds considerable light on the cognitive biases and intellectual incoherence behind America’s catastrophic response to 9/11. Above all, it deepens our understanding of the administration’s twisted interpretation of the terrorist threat. From Fukuyama’s analysis of Bush’s foreign policy, we can distil five debatable but stimulating propositions. First, the fatal decision to invade Iraq was based on a genuine, not merely contrived, ‘conflation’ of the threat posed by rogue states with the threat posed by nuclear terrorists. Second, Cold War habits of mind and a misunderstanding of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union contributed to the administration’s blurred reading of the new enemy and therefore to its decision to launch an ineffectual, misdirected and self-defeating counterattack. Third, the neo-con democratisation project, having become a widely publicised justification for the invasion after the fact, makes assumptions about the nature of the threat that clash with the basic theoretical framework of the administration’s war on terror. Fourth, non-military counterterrorism policies in Europe (multilateral police operations and proposed social programmes designed to aid the integration of Europe’s alienated Islamic youth), reflect a much clearer understanding of the terrorist threat than unilateral military intervention in the Middle East. And finally, the administration’s visceral hostility to multilateralism has led it to play down threats to US national security that can be managed only co-operatively.

I will limit myself here to discussing the two propositions that seem to have attracted rather less informed comment than the others: first, that Cold War habits of mind are alive and well in the Bush administration; and second, that the neo-con ‘democratisation’ project clashes with the assumptions those same neo-cons make about the terrorist threat and what to do about it.
to continue (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n19/holm01_.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:29 AM

Nobody has to be vile
Slavoj Zizek

Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate – that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?

Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.

So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.

to continue (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/zize01_.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:41 AM

Learning to live
Ramona Fotiade

Jacques Derrida
APPRENDRE A VIVRE ENFIN
Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum
53pp. Paris: Galilée/Le Monde. 15euros.
2 7186 0679 7

"I am waging war against myself”, declared Jacques Derrida in an interview with Le Monde last year, published less than two months before he succumbed to the after-effects of pancreatic cancer in a Paris hospital. A philosopher’s private life has rarely been so closely scrutinized by the media, and, to a certain extent, so persistently interwoven with conflicting accounts of his thought, in recent times. Two documentary films have
further contributed to blurring the boundary between the private and the public personae, through an invasive, if enlightening, incursion into Derrida’s everyday existence. The only other salient example in post-war French culture that comes to mind is Jean-Paul Sartre, whose militant left-wing convictions and media-friendly presence in the political arena went hand in hand with his philosophical account of engagement. However, deconstruction certainly had more affinities with post-structuralism than Sartrean existentialism, given its initial concern with epistemological rather than ontological issues. Derrida’s sustained attacks on the classical metaphysical tradition and the combined presuppositions of theological and ontological discourses further reinforced the impression that the aims of deconstruction were obviously at odds with the scope of the early or derived “philosophies of existence”. Yet Derrida’s increasing concern with the aporias of personal experience and philosophical reflection, or what could be said to constitute, beyond abstract ethical considerations, a fundamental interrogation over the meaning of life, perhaps points to the contrary. Having waged war against metaphysics, deconstruction has (for longer than one may think – almost three decades now) turned to the “residual” issue of the philosopher’s own temporal presence in the world, and the aporias of an autobiographical discourse which, having survived the demise of the traditional notion of “the subject”, returns to haunt the self-sufficient proclamations of rational analysis.

The interview published in Le Monde has been reprinted in book form as Apprendre à vivre enfin. It takes its cue from the opening line of the “Exordium” to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx: “Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: ‘I would like to learn to live finally’”. The prologue to what was then an analysis mainly and explicitly devoted to the political and economic state of play after the collapse of Communism this time provides the occasion for decidedly autobiographical reflections,
that point to the “testamentary” character of
Derrida’s last interview (as mentioned in Jean Birnbaum’s introduction). To the series of questions that follow the strange first statement in Spectres of Marx (such as: “Who would learn? From whom? To teach to live, but whom? Will we ever know? Will we ever know how to live and what to ‘learn to live’ means?”), Derrida replies by spontaneously adopting the first-
person singular point of view:

"Non, je n’ai jamais appris-à-vivre. Mais alors, pas du tout! Apprendre à vivre, cela devrait signifier apprendre à mourir, à prendre en compte, pour l’accepter, la mortalité absolue (sans salut, ni résurrection, ni rédemption – ni pour soi ni pour l’autre).
(No, I have never learned-to-live. But then, really not at all! To learn to live, that must mean to learn to die, to take into consideration, in order to accept, absolute mortality (without salvation, or resurrection or redemption) –neither for oneself, nor for the other.)"

to continue, which I strongly recommend :) (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25344-1898041,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:53 AM

Broken by bars
Rachel Polonsky

MOTHERLAND. A philosophical history of Russia. By Lesley Chamberlain. 331pp. Atlantic Books. £25. 1 84354 285 4
Consolation still comes to the political prisoner in the form of Philosophy.

Like Boethius in his dungeon at Pavia, out of favour with his ruler, accused of "using unholy means to obtain offices corruptly", and awaiting the "confiscation of (his) property", Mikhail Khodorkovsky has turned to the "remedies of reasoning". Recently, through the internet, the Russian oil billionaire, in prison for over a year facing charges of fraud, conveyed regret that he had not relieved himself of the "tyranny of property" years ago, to enhance his "inner freedom" by "devoting most of (his) time to studying world history and idealist philosophy".

In Russia, the contemplation of abstract and ultimate questions has long been a provocation to tyrants as well as a consolation to prisoners. Soon after the French Revolution, Russia's outstanding Enlightenment thinker Aleksandr Radishchev, who had written an ode in defence of tyrannicide and embraced the concepts of natural law, universal rights, and the social contract, was banished to Siberia. Thus ended Russia's "Age of Reason". In the early nineteenth century, where Lesley Chamberlain begins Motherland, her "philosophical history of Russia", Tsar Nicholas I purged the universities of their philosophy departments in response to the Decembrist attempt on his life of 1825: a "touching story", Chamberlain writes, "of idealism wildly miscalculating the effects of reasonable action in an unreasonable country".

Repeatedly, throughout the nineteenth century, university courses in philosophy were officially proscribed or censored. Original philosophical speculation took place elsewhere, often in a morally and politically urgent but technically undisciplined fashion, as svobodnoe myslitel'stvo (free thought-mongering) conducted in solitude or in informal kruzhki, intelligentsia discussion "circles".

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25344-1888678,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:55 AM

Capital ideas
Harold James

Joseph Stiglitz
MAKING GLOBALIZATION WORK
The next steps to global justice
358pp. Allen Lane. £20.
0 7139 9909 8
US: Norton. $29.95. 0 393 06122 1

Frederic S. Mishkin
THE NEXT GREAT GLOBALIZATION
How disadvantaged nations can harness their financial systems to get rich
310pp. Princeton University Press. £17.95.
(US $27.95).
0 691 12154 0

Are the big debates about globalization now over? The massive demonstrations that disrupted the 1999 WTO meetings, or the 2001 Genoa summit, or the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF, or of the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF), now seem part of a rather distant past. Many former critics now see at least some advantages of globalization, and the more intelligent insist that they always wanted a “better globalization” rather than looking for out-and-out confrontation with economic modernity (in the style of, for instance, Islamic fundamentalists). In particular, the dramatic economic growth of India and China seems to indicate that opening to the world market is a way of producing growth but also of alleviating poverty. Third World activists want more, not less, globalization, and a dismantling of the trade barriers of the industrial countries.

At the same time, many of the former advocates of globalization in the business and political world of the advanced industrial countries are now deeply worried, because in their countries globalization seems to be responsible for job losses and pay reductions. The consequence is not only a political backlash, but also an intense populist concern with corporate governance, corporate abuses and the excesses of executive pay. Whereas, until recently, the most dramatic effects were seen in the market for unskilled labour, and consequently most policy thinkers simply saw better training as an answer, it has become clear that skilled service jobs (most famously in computer software, but also in medical and legal analysis) can also be “outsourced”. Consequently, the gigantic Western middle class – the great winner of the twentieth century – is now alarmed. Such responses naturally terrify business leaders, who want to devise some appropriate response that will not hurt them too much. Events such as the WEF, formerly parodied as the fiesta of pro-globalization fanatics, are now packed with presentations by globalization critics and choruses about corporate social responsibility

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2477960,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 12:58 AM

Doomed international
Kenneth Anderson

Francis Fukuyama
AFTER THE NEOCONS
America at the crossroads
226pp. Profile. Ј12.99.
1 861 97922 3

The neoconservative influence on American foreign policy has not had an enthusiastic response outside the United States. Its failure to bring peace and democracy to Iraq has now resulted in a spate of critiques in America itself, even from within the policy establishment. The highest-level defection has been that of Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992), the paean to the triumph of capitalism that became a canonical neoconservative text of the 1990s, articulating the transition from the Clinton administration to that of George W. Bush. In his new book, After the Neocons, Fukuyama argues that key neoconservative tenets were systematically violated in making the case for the war in Iraq, and, further, that the broader attempt to combat terror is ill-served not only by the war but also by the neoconservative project of democratic reform in the Middle East. The failure of these projects, he argues, is a phenomenon less of the Middle East than of the disoriented modernity of Muslims in the West – Western Europe particularly. In conclusion, he offers a replacement for neoconservative foreign policy, something that he calls “realistic Wilsonianism”.

The arguments over Fukuyama’s new book have not just been among conservative think-tank intellectuals. Soon after publication the White House itself entered the brawl, sending emails citing contradictions between Fukuyama’s past statements and the positions taken in his new book, particularly his support in 1988 for the forcible overthrow of Saddam Hussein. As Tod Lindberg, Editor of the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review, put it, the Bush administration has been “more influenced by Mr. Fukuyama’s work than by that of any other living thinker”.

On the sidelines, liberal commentators and reviewers in the United States have watched with a mixture of righteousness and glee the long-awaited conservative crackup over the ideological basis of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

The End of History and the Last Man began as an article written while Fukuyama was at the Rand Corporation, the quintessential Cold War think tank. Written in the flush of victory and the collapse of Soviet Communism, it argued that the world was at a historical moment in which history itself – at least “history” in the sense of fundamental arguments over political ideology – was essentially over. Liberal democracy, market capitalism, and the welfare state had won, both because they were right in principle and because they had been proven right in practice, while their twentieth-century totalitarian, collectivist competitors – Communism, Nazism and Fascism – had all been seen off. The End of History was, then, a disquisition on the end of alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism, at least those alternatives that sprang from the modernizing project. The book did not consider the possibility of a challenge from outside the realm of modernity as understood in the West. Islam is mentioned only in passing.

Much of the anger directed at Fukuyama by neoconservatives and by Bush administration intellectuals since the publication of After the Neocons arises from the perception that he intended The End of History to be a universal pronouncement, applicable across the span of world history, not limited merely to the ideologies of modernity. In his new book Fukuyama makes no retraction; he claims rather to have been misread. His argument was never meant to be universal, he says, and it is the fault of the neocons for not recognizing the limits of what a policy of promoting democracy and liberalism in the Middle East can – and cannot – get you.

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2367095,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 01:06 AM

The American seen
Stein Ringen

Claus Offe
REFLECTIONS ON AMERICA
Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States
Translated by Patrick Camiller
115pp. Polity. Ј45.
0 7456 3505 9

This slim and beautifully crafted book packs in nearly two centuries of continental European sociological observation of “America”, from Alexis de Tocqueville, who travelled there in 1831, through to Claus Offe himself, with his series of lectures given in 2003. The fascination lay, and still lies, in observing a Republic created for the stated purpose of safeguarding liberty, and making equality its instrument to that end. European sociologists have wanted to know if that is a practicable social model.

What outside observers have always seen, writes Offe, is “the precariousness of liberty in capitalist societies”. Today, of course, there is deep concern over the destiny of freedom, and not only in the United States, but that concern is as old as is the republic of liberty.

There is a striking similarity in what sociologists as different as Tocqueville, Max Weber and Theodor Adorno saw in the US. They saw liberty – precarious but nevertheless always vibrant. They saw equality – too much of it rather than too little. They saw unique features of social life, in particular the strength of religion and of voluntary associations. They saw excessive equality as a threat to liberty, and they saw religious and associational life as the bastion that kept that threat at bay.

That similarity breaks down when we get to Offe’s own reflections on the United States in the twenty-first century. So much has changed that an inclusive transatlantic concept of “the West” hardly applies any longer. The US has become “distinctive”, and the comparative curiosity of Offe’s predecessors is no longer meaningful. Offe’s reflections then turn away from the American social model to America the world power.

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2334832,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 01:09 AM

Interpreting global law
Lawrence R. Douglas

Philippe Sands
LAWLESS WORLD
Making and breaking global rules
404pp. Penguin. Paperback, Ј8.99.
0 141 01799 6
John Yoo

THE POWERS OF WAR AND PEACE
The Constitution and foreign affairs after 9/11
366pp. University of Chicago Press. $29. Distributed in the UK by Wiley. Ј20.50.
0 226 96031 5

For more than fifty years, the United States and Britain stood as two of the great defenders of international law. In 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt drafted the Atlantic Charter, a vision of a future world order based on limiting the use of military force which served as the inspiration for the grounding principles of the United Nations. In the waning days of the Second World War, the two countries energetically supported the creation of the world’s first international criminal tribunal, to punish Nazi aggression and atrocities. More recently, the US pushed strongly to establish international tribunals to try war criminals from the Balkans and Rwanda, backing these courts with substantial financial and logistical support. And if the Clinton Administration never entirely overcame its suspicions of the International Criminal Court, it nevertheless signed on to the tribunal’s enabling statute.

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2174060,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 01:21 AM

Soft despotism
Stein Ringen

Robert A. Dahl
ON POLITICAL EQUALITY
142pp. Yale University Press. Ј14.99 (US $24).
0 300 11607 6

This is a tiny book, 120 small pages of text; mild-mannered, careful and balanced, but in the end disturbing. Robert A. Dahl argues that something is afoot in the world of democracy, and it’s getting serious. Everywhere, people want democracy. Those who get it rejoice. Where it is absent or weak, rulers often insist that for their populations other things matter more. In particular from Asia, we are told that people hold to “non-Western” values and ask for effective delivery in government, not democracy. Yet, when the matter is put to the test, people prefer democracy.

They have good reasons. Everyone wants to live well and to decide over their own lives. Democracy fosters well-being and protects freedom, at least better than any other regime. The magic is government by consent, whereby politicians are rewarded if they rule as citizens want, and punished if they do not. Government by consent comes from equality, from everyone having a say, and the same say behind collective decision-making. Therefore, when we want democracy we also want equality.

Where democracy is most advanced, however, economic and social conditions are notoriously unequal. Democracy coexists most comfortably with market capitalism, and market capitalism thrives on inequality; in recent times massively increasing inequality. Although we live in societies of inequality, we do enjoy a range of political equalities: first, in the vote, an institution we mostly take for granted but which is utterly remarkable. It enables citizens to appoint their leaders and to throw them out if they are no good, and it gives everyone an equal say in these matters so that no individuals or small groups are able to decide public business on their own. Elections are complicated and costly. Any economist can prove that this is an inefficient way of spending time, organization and money. The fact that we continue to hold elections is proof that citizens value democracy and understand its logic of equality.

Then there are rights. Where there is democracy, human and political rights are universal. Everyone has the right to speak, read and listen freely, to worship freely, to form families freely, to be treated fairly by the police and in the courts. This, too, is cumbersome and costly, but no economic calculus is going to compel us to give away our basic rights. On the ground, these democratic virtues are always imperfect but no less real for that.
In recent decades, while some forms of inequality have increased shockingly, political equality has advanced marvellously. From 1985 to 2000, the number of authoritarian regimes in the world went down from sixty-seven to twenty-six. More than two-thirds of the world’s people live in countries with multi-party electoral systems. (If China came around, 90 per cent would.) In On Political Equality, Professor Dahl speaks more forcefully for equality than most theorists now incline to do. In so doing, he is an advocate of practical reality and not just lofty idealism.

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2432206,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 01:33 AM

Postmodern families
Michele Pridmore-Brown

Rosanna Hertz
SINGLE BY CHANCE,
MOTHERS BY CHOICE
How women are choosing parenthood
without marriage and creating the new
American family
304pp. Oxford University Press. $26
0 195 17990 0

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett’s ageing and still single friend Charlotte Lucas is, at twenty-seven, faced with a kind of Hobson’s choice. She must decide between accepting the marriage proposal of the pompous clergyman Mr Collins, whom she describes as neither sensible nor agreeable – and spinsterhood, which would essentially mean falling off the social landscape into a kind of wasteland. She chooses the former. Charlotte is clever, educated in the manner of her day, and eminently sensible. However, without a dowry or a strikingly pretty face to attract men with fortunes, her options are almost nil. Given her advanced age (by the standards of the time), she must not so much choose as settle for Mr Collins if she wishes to have a “respectable establishment” and children. Her virtue lies in graciously accepting her fate.

Single women have been redefining spinsterhood or rather relegating the negative connotations of the condition (being unchosen, having few options) to the dustbins of history for the past half century. Many of their latter-day sisters are reproductive entrepreneurs at the vanguard of social revolution, not because they necessarily want to be – indeed Rosanna Hertz in Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice calls them “reluctant revolutionaries” – but because marriage simply did not happen in their twenties and thirties. Either Mr Right (or Ms Right, for that matter) failed to materialize and they refused to settle for a Mr Collins – or for any variety of reasons, they found it in their best interests to separate out romantic and parenting relationships. In short, they opted for motherhood without marriage or a long-term cohabiting partner. These women are creating a new taxonomy for kin relations and family-making and, according to Hertz, quietly but irrevocably laying the groundwork for a new model of the family.

Hertz’s book is based on in-depth interviews with sixty-five middle-class and upper-middle-class single mothers in Massachusetts, where she is a Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, about four out of ten babies are born to unwed mothers. Some are born to co-habiting couples, especially in the UK, and so the mothers are not really single – but most are born to mothers who are young, poor and single by default. In this study, Hertz is not concerned with this disenfranchised majority, but rather with their privileged counterparts: the still small but burgeoning population of established women who actively choose single motherhood: “single mothers by choice”, or “lone mothers by design”, as they call themselves. Significantly, most of the women in her sample were between their mid-thirties and their early forties when they had or adopted their first child; this is precisely the age group that is experiencing the most precipitous rise in single motherhood.

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25351-2576589,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 01:41 AM

An overhyped Harvard?
Martha Nussbaum

Harry R. Lewis
EXCELLENCE WITHOUT A SOUL
How a great university forgot education. 288pp. New York: PublicAffairs. $26.
1 58648 393

America’s great universities, argues Harry R. Lewis, are becoming soulless and consumer-driven. Increasingly, they cater to their students’ desires, rather than forming their students’ characters. They have little concern for their role in the creation of citizenship. As a result, American society is in trouble, because America’s future depends on superior education at these elite universities.
Lewis, a distinguished computer scientist and former Dean of Harvard College at Harvard University, focuses on Harvard throughout, especially the time during the troubled Presidency of Lawrence Summers. Summers submitted his resignation in February 2006, after controversies over many matters, including his plans for the curriculum, his management style, and, perhaps most important, his defence of the economist Andrei Shleifer, whose indictment for conspiracy to defraud the US Government, as a result of his self-enrichment while advising the Russian Government on Harvard’s behalf, cost Harvard a settlement of more than $30 million. The Shleifer matter was painstakingly analysed by David McClintick in an 18,000-word article in the Institutional Investor, January 2006, but Lewis’s Excellence Without a Soul provides a handy brief summary of the main issues. Other details about the Summers Presidency also appear. But the reader who looks for a balanced assessment of Summers and his tenure would do well to read Richard Bradley’s excellent Harvard Rules, which offers real insight into the personae and their ideas, with a lively and well-written narrative. In Lewis’s earnest but rather tedious volume, the isolated anecdotes tell us little about the man and the complexities of the issues surrounding him.

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25351-2266728,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 02:00 AM

Worth the space?
Eric Korn

LOST FOR WORDS. The hidden history of The Oxford English Dictionary. By Lynda Mugglestone. 273pp. Yale University Press. Ј19.95 (US $30). 0 300 10699 8
Luck does not always come to the undeserving. Lynda Mugglestone, editor of the Oxford History of the English Language and author of the invitingly subtitled Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the untrodden forest (2002), speaks of "a chance finding" of a set of vigorously corrected proof sheets from the first fascicle of the first edition of the OED, to be precise "Abandon-Anglosaxon".

(Quite a few of the sections have similarly hortatory or sententious titles.) But they were chance-found by a rare intelligence which was not daunted by the unordered mass of fossil lexicography that further digging yielded (in the Bodleian's Murray Papers and the Oxford University Press's dictionary archive).

This massive unwiped palimpsest of correction and counter-correction, these raw data, in many diverse hands, not all easily legible, lay just beneath the surface alluvium for more than a century, but to Professor Mugglestone they unlocked a whole archaeological horizon; fifty years of struggle, of changing priorities, of continual frontier wars, as the Dictionary went endlessly over budget, hugely oversize, and half a century behind schedule. Rude reality, or as rude as it gets in Oxford, came to affect the straightforward methodology with which James Murray had begun the project: to include rather than exclude, to produce a complete inventory of the language.

Mugglestone's account of the dictionary wars, or rather the endless skirmishes that never became anything as definite as a war, in Lost for Words, is enlightening, and hugely entertaining.

She deals extensively with scientific terminology, with neologisms and nonce-words, with foreign words incompletely nativized, and especially with the principles, conscious and unconscious, by which Murray and his contributors and critics selected, as selection became more and more an economic necessity. One pleasing critical insight in particular informs Lynda Mugglestone's work

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25348-1886012_1,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 02:21 AM

China at sea
Jonathan Mirsky

Edward L. Dreyer
ZHENG HE
China and the oceans in the early Ming dynasty 1404–1433
238pp. Longman. Paperback, £12.99.
0 3210 8443 8

During the early years of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the Chinese eunuch Zheng He was the commander of the greatest state-directed voyages in the age of sail. Zheng’s seven vast armadas, with crews and soldiers numbering about 27,000, included the largest wooden ships ever built. Beginning in 1405, these voyages were the first projection of Chinese Imperial power by sea over vast distances, reaching across the Indian Ocean to the eastern shores of Africa. They were also the last.

Edward L. Dreyer, a well-known Ming historian, comprehensively examines this stupendous story in his book Zheng He. As he says, his account “rests squarely” on Chinese primary sources, of whose complexities he has masterful control. This mastery extends to details of naval architecture, court hierarchies and maritime geography that for the most part interest only specialists. But some of the information is staggering. Of the well over 200 ships in each armada, more than sixty were 385–440 feet long. The number of Ming ships, which Professor Dreyer considers to have been huge shallow-draught river barges, overshadows the Spanish Armada; in size, they dwarfed British ships-of-the-line such as Nelson’s Victory. Most of the 27,000 men in the fleet were soldiers, intended to overawe any ruler or potentate wherever the Chinese fleet appeared.

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-2563759,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 02:24 AM

History revisited
Keith Thomas

In 1966, the TLS devoted three issues to “New Ways in History”. They were orchestrated by the restless medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough, who had turned from the Middle Ages to contemporary history in the belief that recent world events had made irrelevant the austerely remote tradition of scholarship in which he had been raised. Many of the contributors must have been chosen in the hope that they would adopt an aggressively forward-looking tone; and they did not disappoint. M. I. Finley, one of the few classical historians in those days whom modern historians would have recognized as deserving the name, deplored his colleagues’ intellectual isolation, their ignorance of sociology and their failure to confront “central human problems”. E. P. Thompson, whose book The Making of the English Working Class had appeared in 1963, attacked “the established constitutional and parliamentary-political Thing”, in the name of history from below. The anonymous author of the leading article (Barraclough himself) asserted that historians should align themselves with the social sciences by tackling the questions “which ordinary people wanted answering”. Sir Isaiah Berlin, he added unkindly, was wrong to dismiss “scientific” history as a “chimera”; a younger generation of historians had passed him by.

The opening article was even more confrontational. It asserted that the first half of the twentieth century was “a time when most historians temporarily lost their bearings”, and declared that “academic history, for all its scholarly rigour, had succeeded in explaining remarkably little about the workings of human society or the fluctuations in human affairs”. The remedy, it suggested, was not to “grub away in the old empirical tradition” but to forge a closer relationship with the social sciences, especially social anthropology, sociology and social psychology, to develop a more sophisticated conceptual vocabulary and to employ statistical techniques. The future lay with the computer, which would replace the “stout boots” worn by the advanced historians of the previous generation. In the United States the new econometric history was already “sweeping all before it”.

Forty years later, the author of these brash words still bears the scars inflicted in the resulting furore. Not only did Isaiah Berlin take some convincing that I was not the anonymous leader-writer, but, by an unfortunate piece of timing, I had invited that outstanding grubber in the empirical tradition, G. R. Elton, to an Oxford college dinner in the week after my article appeared. It was a chilly evening. My guest went back to Cambridge to write The Practice of History (1967), a robust rejection of all new ways in history in general and of my views in particular. It was a faint consolation to find, in the “index of historians” appended to that work, the name Thomas making an incongruous appearance between those of Tacitus and Thucydides

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-2399024,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 02:44 AM

Humboldt's rift
Laurence Brockliss

What was - and is - a university for?
A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY IN EUROPE. Volume Three: Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1800-1945). By Walter Ruegg, editor.746pp. Cambridge University Press. Ј90 (US $150). - 0 521 36107 9

University histories were once dry, antiquarian and self-referential tomes respectfully published to celebrate centenaries, and of little interest to anyone but their professoriate and alumni. In the past twenty-five years, however, there has been a sea change.

Commemorative volumes still appear, but their focus is no longer normally so narrow and parochial: instead, their authors and editors strive to place the history of the university in a much broader comparative context whereby the changing educational role and significance of the institution can be properly evaluated. The best illustration of this historiographical revolution is to be found in the changing tone of the eight-volume History of the University of Oxford that appeared between 1984 and 2000 in no obvious chronological order.

The early volumes have an old-fashioned feel: while always scholarly, they are acts of traditional piety. The later ones, on the other hand, are tougher and much more sophisticated, and not afraid to cut Oxford down to size.

The emergence of a new type of university history must largely reflect developments in higher education since the 1960s. Throughout the Western world, universities today educate some 40-50 per cent of young adults. As institutions of teaching as well as research, they are the beneficiaries of large sums of government money, and in Europe, at least, subject to ever-increasing government supervision. Thought to be the gateway to social mobility and economic well being in a democratic age, they are deemed too important to be left to govern themselves. In a period when their social and economic role is continually picked over by pundits and politicians, it was inevitable that social and cultural historians would start to look more closely and sensitively at their role in the non-democratic past. In the Anglo-American world, the first sign that the university was about to become a historical discipline in its own right was the establishment of the journal History of Universities, published for the first time in 1981, under the editorship of the late Charles Schmitt of the Warburg Institute. Almost immediately, this was followed by a decision of the Standing Conference of Rectors, Presidents and Vice-Chancellors of the European universities, in 1983, to sponsor the publication of a four volume History of the University in Europe. The first volume, on the Middle Ages, appeared in English in 1991; the second, on the early modern period, in

1996: both edited by the Belgian historian Hilde de Ridder-Symoens.

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-1886721,00.html)

Iqbol

02-11-2007, 02:58 AM

Rectifications along the Rhine
Christopher Clark

David Blackbourn
THE CONQUEST OF NATURE
Water, landscape and the making of modern Germany512pp. Jonathan Cape. Ј30.
0 224 06071 6

In 1809, inspired by the Austrian campaign against Napoleon, the poet and sometime Prussian guards officer Heinrich von Kleist envisaged an all-out war against the French:

Whiten with their scattered bones
Every hollow, every hill;
From what was left by fox and crow
The hungry fish shall eat their fill;
Block the Rhine with their cadavers;
Until, plugged up by so much flesh,
It breaks its banks and surges west
To draw our borderline afresh!

What strikes one about these lines – apart from their brutality – is the strangeness of the notion that one might use the massed corpses of French soldiers as a means of correcting the course of the River Rhine. Kleist’s conceit was, of course, a sarcastic gloss on the contemporary French claim that the Rhine constituted the “natural frontier” of France. But it was also topical in another, seldom noted sense: in 1809, when he wrote those lines, plans really were afoot for a massive “rectification” of the Rhine.

The nineteenth-century transformation of the Rhine was the greatest civil engineering scheme that had ever been undertaken in German Europe. For centuries, the river’s meandering waters had flowed through an archipelago of thickly wooded islands. Its navigable course constantly shifted, sometimes twice or three times a year. On those stretches of the upper Rhine where it passed between France and the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, this meant that an island or village that was French one year might find itself on the German side of the border in the following spring.

All this changed after the rectifications. Under the indefatigable supervision of the Badenese engineer Johann Gottfried Tulla, the river was rechannelled through a system of cuts, excavations and embankments over 354 kilometres of its length, from the Swiss border at Basel to the Hessian border at Worms. The multiple tributaries and deviations of the Rhine valley were marshalled into a single bed, with (in Tulla’s words) “gentle curves adapted to nature or . . . where it is practicable, a straight line”. The object was to banish for ever the unpredictable floods that periodically devastated the towns and villages of the Rhine Valley and to create a faster, deeper, shorter river whose formerly marshy plain could be turned over to agriculture.

More than 2,000 islands and outcrops – comprising a billion square metres of real estate – were excavated out of existence. Their substance was used as landfill for a massive chain of main dykes. Immense stocks of timber were consumed to shore up the cuts and embankments. As the engineers gradually tautened the river, its length fell, for the stretch between Basel and Worms, from 354 to 273 kilometres. The work was long (it took half a century to complete) and arduous, but also politically delicate. Along those stretches where the river was an international border, there were protracted negotiations with the French. There was also bitter domestic opposition to the scheme, especially from towns that stood to lose their access to the river, and those that faced the prospect of being stranded on the wrong bank.

As David Blackbourn shows in this wide-ranging and highly original study, the management of water has been central to the making of modern Germany. The Conquest of Nature opens on the floodplains of the Oder River, drained and converted to agriculture during the reign of Frederick the Great. Then we move west to the Upper Rhine and from there to Jade Bay on the North Sea coast of Oldenburg, a place of sodden moors, malodorous mudflats and devastating storm floods, and thence to the colossal dam-building schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At every point, Blackbourn brings home the epic scale of the human effort required to discipline the great watercourses. The drainage and rectification works on the Oder River were carried out over many years of exhausting toil by thousands of shovel-wielding labourers and soldiers, working waist deep in malarial swamps. The construction of the Prussian harbour facilities on the mudflats of what would become Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay cost the lives of 247 labourers. When its retaining wall was completed, after six years of construction work, on June 26, 1914, the Edertal Dam was the largest in Europe, its waters stretching for sixteen miles over a valley floor dotted with drowned villages and farms.

to continue (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-2345440,00.html)

gulya_21

02-28-2007, 09:22 AM

Pochemu na zapade i v Rossii ,v stranah gde prosvetaet demokratiya parallelno prosvetaet bezduhovnost'?

Iqbol

03-02-2007, 04:17 PM

Pochemu na zapade i v Rossii ,v stranah gde prosvetaet demokratiya parallelno prosvetaet bezduhovnost'?
Your question concerns those countires which could be described other than democratic as well; and the answer to your question can't be a simple response. Rather you have to look for various elements that combined can lead you to satisfying explanations.
One of such kind of arguments I had just read in a book on a poet Muhammad Iqbol. So the book contains a very interesting passage:
"Teaching is of two kinds. One is conducted in words, expressions, lectures, books, etc., and is called "instruction". The other deals with spiritual upbringing, character-building, etc., and is called "education". Generally speaking, one is related to letters and the other with actions. But the tragedy is that in the contemporary era almost all over the world, "instruction" stands for "education". Hence the aim of the character-building is being universally neglected. This is why individuals without humaneness come out of "instruction centres" miscalled "educational institutions".

Dr. Muhammad Munawwar, "Iqbal - Poet-Philosopher of Islam"

Iqbol

03-06-2007, 01:14 PM

Chaynalip ketgan mavzulardan biriyu, lekin anawi boshida Zawahiri'ga bogliq faktlarni qayerdan topishdi ekan :rolleyes:

The Original Targets (http://lrb.co.uk/v29/n03/meek01_.html)

LRB | Vol. 29 No. 3 dated 8 February 2007 | James Meek

The Original Targets
James Meek
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida’s Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright · Allen Lane, 470 pp, Ј25.00

In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty. Zawahiri had them shot, filmed their confessions and executions, and put video copies out to warn other potential traitors. His Sudanese hosts were so outraged that they expelled Zawahiri and his group immediately.

It does not exonerate Zawahiri that the boys really had, as Lawrence Wright explains, tried to kill him: Ahmed by telling Egyptian spies exactly when Zawahiri was going to come to treat him for malaria; the other boy, Musab, by twice trying to plant a bomb. The assassination attempts were part of the Egyptian government’s ruthless efforts to destroy Zawahiri and his organisation, al-Jihad, after al-Jihad came close to killing the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. ‘Ruthless’, in this instance, is a merited adjective. The way Egyptian intelligence recruited the boys – both were sons of senior al-Jihad members, and Musab’s father was the al-Qaida treasurer – was to drug them, anally rape them, then show them photos of the abuse and blackmail them. The boys were trapped; the photos could have led to their execution by al-Jihad as surely as their subsequent betrayal.

The story does more than illuminate the sheer vileness of the conflict that has been underway for decades between the death-loving hardcore of Islamic revolutionaries and the allies of European and American governments in the Islamic world. It underlines the centrality of Egypt to the origins and perpetuation of the conflict. One of the darker choruses of this excellent work of journalism is the success that three of those allied governments, the Saudi Arabian, Pakistani and Egyptian, have had in diverting the fundamentalist warriors away from their original prime target – them – and towards the West. It’s been a remarkable feat; not only have the rulers of those three countries deflected Islamic revolutionaries by simultaneously repressing them, making concessions to them, and rechannelling their anger abroad, but they have gained additional support from the very Western countries which are now experiencing the consequences of that anger.

Iqbol

03-24-2007, 07:37 PM

The American Prison Nightmare (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20056)
By Jason DeParle
Punishment and Inequality in America
by Bruce Western
Russell Sage Foundation, 247 pp., $29.95

Confronting Confinement: A Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons
by John J. Gibbons and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, co-chairs
Vera Institute of Justice,122 pp. (available at www.prisoncommission.org )

Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy
by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen
Oxford University Press, 359 pp., $29.95

Bruce Western makes a crucial point at the start of his important book, Punishment and Inequality in America: "If prisons affected no one except the criminals on the inside, they would matter less." But with more than two million Americans behind bars, the impact of mass incarceration is impossible to contain. Their fate affects the taxpayers who support them, the guards who guard them, the families they leave behind, and the communities to which they return. Not even the war in Iraq escapes the reach of prison culture; Sergeant Charles Graner, the villain of Abu Ghraib, worked as a Pennsylvania prison guard.

Everyone is affected, but not equally. Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites in the same age group. Whites with only a high school education get locked up twenty times as often as those with college degrees. Among the many impediments to reform has been the gap between the people who make criminal justice policy—mostly educated whites who favor imprisonment, especially during twelve years of Republican congressional control—and those who live with the consequences.

There is another impediment to reform: mass incarceration seems to have made the streets safer. The vast increase in the prison and jail population from about 380,000 in 1975 to 2.2 million today overlaps with equally stunning declines in crime. The homicide rate in the 1990s fell by 43 percent. Many critics of incarceration argue (a bit too quickly) that crime would have fallen without the prison boom. Perhaps. Still the value of safer neighborhoods is immediate, while the costs of excessive imprisonment are theoretical and vague.

Western's achievement—a large one —is to make them less vague. He identifies mass incarceration as a major cause of modern inequality, with large and uncounted collateral effects. Imprisonment does more than reflect the divides of race and class. It deepens those divides—walling off the disadvantaged, especially unskilled black men, from the promise of American life. While violent criminals belong in jail, more than half of state and federal inmates are in for nonviolent crimes, especially selling drugs. Their long sentences deprive women of potential husbands, children of fathers, and convicts of a later chance at a decent job. Similar arguments have been made before, but Western, a Princeton sociologist, makes a quantitative case. Along the way, his revisionist account of the late 1990s detracts from its reputation as an era of good news for the poor. Its appearance coincides with several other instructive new studies of American incarceration.

2.
For much of the twentieth century, about one American in a thousand was confined to a cell. The proportion of Americans behind bars started rising in the mid-Seventies, and by 2003 had done so for twenty-eight consecutive years. Counting jails, there are now seven Americans in every thousand behind bars. That is nearly five times the historic norm and seven times higher than most of Western Europe.

The penal population grew because crime increased; because the number of police and prosecutors grew (which raised the odds of punishment); and because policymakers, disillusioned with the ethos of rehabilitation, imposed tougher penalties. The increase in severity occurred on the front end with longer sentences and reduced judicial discretion to shorten them, and on the back end by making fewer prisoners eligible for early release.

Meanwhile, the "war on drugs" led to the arrest of growing numbers of small-time users and dealers. By the late 1990s, 60 percent of federal inmates were in for drug offenses. The result is an ever-growing prison system, populated to a significant degree by people who need not be there. It was no liberal advocate but Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy who offered a damning view of criminal justice in the United States: "Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long."

Despite the crackdown, white men with college degrees are only slightly more likely than previously to end up in prison. Among black men with college degrees, the odds of imprisonment have fallen. But by 2000, high school dropouts of either race were being locked up three times as often as they had been two decades before. And racial disparities have become immense. By the time they reach their mid-thirties, a full 60 percent of black high school dropouts are now prisoners or ex-cons. This, Western warns, has resulted in "a collective experience for young black men that is wholly different from the rest of American society."

Iqbol

03-24-2007, 07:39 PM

Shakespeare and Uses of power (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20073)

Iqbol

03-24-2007, 07:45 PM

Fingerprints of history (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/837/intrvw.htm)
Gamal Nkrumah and Mohamed El-Sayed gauge the state of the world's most troubled region -- the Middle East -- with eminent author Robert Fisk

Fisk, the Beirut-based bestselling and award- winning author, speaks from experience. He covered the Lebanese civil war, the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the two United States-led wars against Iraq and the post-11 September invasion and subsequent occupation of Afghanistan.

For Fisk to single out Pakistan is an eye- opener, for the populous predominantly Muslim nation is not even considered by some to be part of the Middle East proper. Fisk's contention, however, is that the West is shy to focus on the main game, preferring instead to concentrate on sideshows such as Iran's nuclear ambitions, which Fisk reminds whoever listens were first encouraged and nurtured by the West.

"There is a country in the region that has lots of Taliban supporters, lots of Al-Qaeda supporters, whose capital city is in constant chaos and sectarian crisis, and it has got a [nuclear] bomb -- it's called Pakistan," Fisk told Al-Ahram Weekly. "But General Musharraf is our (the West's) friend. What will happen if Musharraf goes? Pakistan is one of the most fragile and dangerous areas," he ponders ominously. "However, we direct our attention to another country, Iran, just as we always do in the Middle East."

Fisk is acutely aware, nonetheless, of a certain basic continuity experienced across the Middle East in recent history. The saga of tragedy and betrayal has not been confined to Palestine. Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan all experienced the horrors of war and violent turmoil. Fisk is an advocate for the study of history. "Journalists should not just take notebooks when covering a story," he insists.

For Fisk, history is personal and the personal is political. "The knights of the First Crusade," he wrote in his book, The Great War for Civilisation, "after massacring the entire population of Beirut, had moved along the very edge of the Mediterranean towards Jerusalem to avoid the arrows of the Arab archers; and I often reflected that they must have travelled over the very Lebanese rocks around which the sea frothed and gurgled opposite my balcony."

...
What about Lebanon now? "Last summer's war between Hizbullah and Israel was in fact between Iran and America. Lebanon is, as usual, the battlefield of others. No one is being killed now, so until now it's okay. However, the situation is very fragile. I know many Christian families who left their homes in Hamra Street, moving on to other areas. These are very bad signs. Iran and America are supporting different sides, and they keep pushing at this fragile state."

As Fisk notes in his celebrated book Pity the Nation, Lebanon is a microcosm of the Middle East. "Lebanon is a confessional society, so if this pushing continues it will split and be Balkanised. The only solution is for Lebanon to become a modern state. Leadership qualities, rather than tribal or sectarian or confessional affiliations, should be [credentials] for top positions," he told the Weekly. "Thousands of Lebanese children were sent abroad during the civil war, and they came back believing in a modern society. They saw the civil war was ridiculous and childish," he adds.

...

Will the truth of the assassination ever come out? "I think one reason why the Syrians are cooperating [in the investigation] is that the Syrians are pretty sure of what exactly happened, for they have a very good intelligence service. My interpretation is that it wasn't a state murder. Since the assassination and up until now I still feel it was a branch of Syrian Baath security."

What about Iran and Afghanistan? "America failed to achieve its goals in Afghanistan. There is no democracy there -- warlords rule. Just like the case in Iraq, the government commands just a few miles around Kabul. In many situations coalition forces find themselves outnumbered by hundreds of Taliban fighters," Fisk notes. "Meanwhile, opium production and exports are higher now than at any time before. The United Nations said that in 2001, under Taliban rule, drug production fell by 45 per cent. The reverse trend happened since the invasion. The situation is not as bad as Iraq, but it is still bad," he laments. "I often wonder why we [the West] are there in Afghanistan," he adds.

As for Iran, Fisk is quick to note that Siemens, the giant German multinational, launched Iran's nuclear programme. It was the West that encouraged the Shah of Iran to go nuclear: "The Shah started the nuclear ambitions of Iran. It was also the Shah who sought nuclear power. It was the West that helped Iran build the Bushehr nuclear facility. The Shah once said that he would like to have a [nuclear] bomb because the Soviets and the Americans had it. Then he was warmly received in the White House, because he was our policeman in the Gulf," Fisk asserts.

Ironically, it was the Islamist Iranian Revolutionary Guard that was against Iran going nuclear: "When the Islamic Revolution took place in Iran, revolutionaries decided to close the nuclear facility because they said 'it's a work of the devil'." It was only after the Iran-Iraq war that the Iranian regime became interested once again in reviving its nuclear programme. As far as Fisk is concerned, Iran is a critically important Middle Eastern nation, but is laden with the time-honoured bureaucracy, red tape and antiquated or parochial perspectives that have long pulled the region backwards.

Is America the region's engine of progress? Not for Robert Fisk. Empires and superpowers follow their own agenda: "In Firdous Square, Baghdad, US marines pulled down the gaunt and massive statue of Saddam by roping it to an armoured personal carrier. It toppled menacingly forward from its plinth to hang lengthways above the ground, right arm still raised in fraternal greetings to the Iraqi people. It was a symbolic moment in more ways than one. I stood behind the first man to seize a hatchet and smash at the imposing grey marble plinth, but within seconds, the marble had fallen away to reveal a foundation of cheap bricks and badly cracked cement. That's what the Americans always guessed Saddam's regime was made of, although they did their best, in the late 70s and early 80s to arm him and service his economy and offer him political support -- to turn him into the very dictator he became," Fisk notes.

Currently, the American empire faces a crisis -- its military power is failing and it has won over few allies. Fisk sees in this a repeat cycle of history. "It goes something like this: Iraqis don't deserve us; our sacrifices are in vain." He extrapolates: "There is a community of hate on the Internet," emanating from the American neoconservative right. Fisk cites the example of a tongue-in-cheek article published in The Los Angeles Times entitled "Those ingrate Iraqis". "We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude ... We've endured great sacrifice to help them," the article quotes US President George W Bush as saying.

Palestine is a different kettle of fish altogether. "The Islamic Movement Hamas didn't succeed because we (Western governments) didn't want them to succeed. We didn't want to talk to them. And they were under sanctions because the Western governments believe that those pesky Palestinians elected the wrong people. Western governments do not want democracy in the Middle East. We are quite happy to have dictators if they are obedient to us. We like them when they invade Iran, but not when they invade Kuwait. We liked Egypt until it nationalised the Suez Canal. Then we bombed Port Said, Ismailia and Suez. Because we have ideological as well as oil interests, we try constantly to refashion the façade that allows us to support various regimes."

Fisk continues: "Western governments want peoples [of the region] to elect political forces these governments like. The Palestinians didn't vote for an Islamic republic, rather they were sick of corruption. The way [Western governments] dealt with Arafat's regime made it bound to be corrupt. If the Palestinians had elected people Western governments had wanted they would have praised this democracy. Western governments and the European Union didn't want to give money to Hamas. They were used to giving it to a Palestinian Authority that was squandering it." Fisk concludes: "From the very beginning I said Oslo would be a tragedy."

What about the new government of national unity bringing Fatah and Hamas together? "Should Hamas recognise the State of Israel? If Israel really wants peace, why don't they sit with Hamas and have a serious, mature discussion to agree on a formula that would work? The question is: Do we want peace or not? Why don't we refer back to UN Security Council Resolution 242 stating that Israel should withdraw from all the territories occupied in 1967?"

Are there other hidden hands in the region's politics? The New Yorker 's Seymour Hersh devotes much time and energy to the role of the Saudis. "By adopting the rigidity of Wahabism the royal family [in Saudi Arabia] found itself in an extraordinary position where they were abiding by the codes of an institution that believes that you should fight corruption, but never overthrow your rulers. So the whole system of the Saudi government walks this tightrope," Fisk muses.

Meanwhile, "Saudi money is going to the Taliban, to our friend General Pervez Musharraf, and it went to Bin Laden." Fisk concludes, tongue-in-cheek: "And money buys respect."