Reappraisals
The proper level of state involvement in the life of the community can no longer be determined by ex hypothesi theorizing. We don’t know what degree of regulation, public ownership, or distributive monopoly is appropriate across the board, only what works or is required in each case. Intervention mechanisms inherited from decisions that were appropriate when first made but that have since become anachronisms, like farm price supports or early retirement on full pay for state employees, are indefensible, above all because they inhibit the growth required to provide truly necessary benefits. Conversely, reductions in state involvement in the provision of public housing, medical facilities, or family services— cuts that seemed to make demographic, economic, and ideological sense when first introduced in the 1970s and 1980s—now look perilously socially divisive, when those who need them have no access to any other resources.
The modern state still has a considerable say over how the economic growth generated in private hands might best be collectively distributed, at least at the local level. If the Left could convincingly argue that it had a set of general principles guiding its choices in the distribution of resources and services and could show that those principles were not merely stubborn defenses of the status quo, making the best of someone else’s bad job, it would have made a considerable advance. It would need to show that it understood that some must lose for all to gain; that a desire to sustain the intervention capacities of the state is not incompatible with acknowledgment of the need for painful reconsideration of the objects of that intervention; that both “regulation” and “deregulation” are morally neutral when taken in isolation. As things now stand, the continental Left merely records its (and its electors’) discomfort at the prospect of rearranging the social furniture; while Britain’s New Labour clings to power on the bankrupt promise that in these tricky matters it has no (unpopular) preferences of any kind.
Reconsideration of principles is notoriously hard, and it is unfortunate, if not altogether accidental, that the Left finds itself confronted with the need to reimagine its whole way of thought under less than propitious economic circumstances. But there is never a good moment for untimely thoughts. For some years to come, the chief burden on the government of any well-run national community will be ensuring that those of its members who are the victims of economic transformations over which the government itself can exercise only limited control nevertheless live decent lives, even (especially) if such a life no longer contains the expectation of steady, remunerative, and productive employment; that the rest of the community is led to an appreciation of its duty to share that burden; and that the economic growth required to sustain this responsibility is not inhibited by the ends to which it is applied. This is a job for the state; and that is hard to accept because the desirability of placing the maximum possible restrictions upon the interventionary capacities of the state has become the cant of our time.
Accordingly, the task of the Left in Europe in the years to come will be to reconstruct a case for the activist state, to show why the lesson for the twenty-first century is not that we should return, so far as possible, to the nineteenth. To do this, the Left must come to terms with its own share of responsibility for the sins of the century that has just ended. It was not so long ago, after all, that West German Social Democrats refused to speak ill of the late, unlamented German Democratic Republic, and there are still French and British Socialists who find it painful to acknowledge their erstwhile sympathy for the Soviet project in precisely its most state-idolatrous forms. But until the European Left has recognized its past propensity to favor power over freedom, to see virtue in anything and everything undertaken by a “progressive” central authority, it will always be backing halfheartedly and shamefacedly into the future: presenting the case for the state and apologizing for it at the same time.
Until and unless this changes, the electors of Longwy and Sarrebourg, like their fellows in Austria, Italy, and Belgium (not to speak of countries farther east), will be tempted to listen to other voices, less timid about invoking the nation-state and “national-capitalism” as the forum for redemptive action. Why are we so sure that the far political Right is behind us for good—or indeed the far Left? The postwar social reforms in Europe were instituted in large measure as a barrier to the return of the sort of desperation and disaffection from which such extreme choices were thought to have arisen. The partial unraveling of those social reforms, for whatever reason, is not risk-free. As the great reformers of the nineteenth century well knew, the Social Question, if left unaddressed, does not just wither away. It goes instead in search of more radical answers.
This essay was first published in 1997 in the journal Foreign Affairs, at the invitation of its then managing editor Fareed Zakaria. He asked me to write about any problem or development in foreign affairs likely to be of significance in years to come. I opted to discuss the new “social question” of poverty, underemployment, and social exclusion and the failure of the political Left to reassess its response to these and other dilemmas of globalization. Nothing that has happened in the intervening decade has led me to moderate my gloomy prognostications—quite the contrary.
PUBLICATION CREDITS
The essays in this book were first published in the following journals:
Chapter I: “Arthur Koestler, the Exemplary Intellectual” in The New Republic, January 2000
Chapter II: “The Elementary Truths of Primo Levi” in The New York Review of Books, May 20, 1999
Chapter III: “The Jewish Europe of Manès Sperber” in The New Republic, April 1, 1996
Chapter IV: “Hannah Arendt and Evil” in The New York Review of Books, April 6, 1995
Chapter V: “Albert Camus: ‘The best man in France’” in The New York Review of Books, October 6, 1994
Chapter VI: “Elucubrations: The ‘Marxism’ of Louis Althusser” in The New Republic, March 7, 1994
Chapter VII: “Eric Hobsbawm and the Romance of Communism” in The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2003
Chapter VIII: “Goodbye to All That? Leszek Kołakowski and the Marxist Legacy” in The New York Review of Books, September 21, 2006
Chapter IX: “A ‘Pope of Ideas’? John Paul II and the Modern World” in The New York Review of Books, October 31, 1996
Chapter X: “Edward Said: The Rootless Cosmopolitan” in The Nation, July 19, 2004
Chapter XI: “The Catastrophe: The Fall of France, 1940” in The New York Review of Books, February 22, 2001
Chapter XII: “À la recherche du temps perdu: France and Its Pasts” in The New York Review of Books, December 3, 1998
Chapter XIII: “The Gnome in the Garden: Tony Blair and Britain’s ‘Heritage’” in The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2001
Chapter XIV: “The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters” in The New York Review of Books, December 2, 1999
Chapter XV: “Romania between History and Europe” in The New York Review of Books, November 1, 2001
Chapter XVI: “Dark Victory: Israel’s Six-Day War” in The New Republic, July 29, 2002
Chapter XVII: “The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up” in Ha’aretz, May 5, 2006
Chapter XVIII: “An American Tragedy? The Case of Whittaker Chambers” in The New Republic, April 14, 1997
Chapter XIX: “The Crisis: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Cuba” in The New York Review of Books, January 15, 1998
Chapter XX: “The Illusionist: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy” in The New York Review of Books, August 13, 1998
Chapter XXI: “Whose Story Is It? The Cold War in Retrospect” in The New York Review of Books, March 23, 2006
Chapter XXII: “The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America” in The London Review of Books, September 21, 2006
Chapter XXIII: “The Good Society: Europe vs. America” in The New York Review of Books, February 10, 2005
Envoi: “The Social Question Redivivus” in Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997
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sp; INDEX
Abel, Lionel
absurd, idea of the
Accumulation of Capital, The (Luxemburg)
Acheson, Dean.
Acton, Lord
Adenauer, Konrad
Adler, Alfred
Adler, Max
Afghanistan
Africa
Aǧca, Mehmet Ali
Age of Capital, The (Hobsbawm)
Age of Extremes, The (Hobsbawm)
Agnew, Spiro T.
Agusta (Belgian company)
Albania
Algeria
Algerian war.
Allen, Richard
Allende, Salvador
Allon, Yigal
Alsop, Joseph
Althusser, Hélène
Althusser, Louis
America Houses
American Enterprise Institute
Améry, Jean
Anderson, Rudolf
Anissimov, Myriam
Annales
Annan, Kofi
Annan, Noel
anti-Americanism
Arab sources of
cold war policies and
Iraq invasion and
anti-Communism
Chambers and
Hobsbawm on
intellectuals and
John Paul and
Koestler and
McCarthyism and
anti-Fascism
anti-Semitism
Germany and
Israel’s critics charged with
Poland and
Romania and
Antohi, Sorin
Antonescu, Ion
Arab-Israeli conflict
Kissinger shuttle diplomacy and
post-change in
solution impediments for
See also Israel, State of; Lebanon; occupied territories; Palestinians; Six-Day War; Yom Kippur War
Arafat, Yassir
Aragon, Louis
Arbatov, Georgi
‘Aref, ’Abd al-Rahman Muhammad
Arendt, Hannah
on Camus
Argentina
Arkan (Serb terrorist).
Armenia/Armenians
arms race
Aron, Raymond .
Arrival and Departure (Koestler)
Arrow, Kenneth
Arrow in the Blue (Koestler)
“Arsenic” (Levi).
Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (Cesarani)
Ashdown, Paddy.
Attali, Jacques
Attlee, Clement
Auschwitz.
Carmelite convent proposal for
Levi’s survival of
Sperber essays on
Austria
Avenir dure longtemps , L’(Althusser)
Ayer, A. J.
Baader-Meinhof gang
Babelon, Jean-Pierre
Bachelard, Gaston
Badinter, Robert.
Bakunin, Mikhail
Balaguer, Escrivá y.
Ball, George
Bangladesh
Barak, Ehud
Barbie, Klaus
Barenboim, Daniel
Barnsley (South Yorkshire)
Barr, Nicholas
Barrès, Maurice.
Barrett, William
Barthes, Roland
Bartlett, Charles
Barzun, Jacques
Basque nationalists
Baudelaire, Charles
Baudouin (King of the Belgium)
Bauer, Otto
Bay of Pigs.
Bazaine, François, Marshall
Beard, Charles
Beauvoir, Simone de
Beckham, David.
Begin, Menachem
Beinart, Peter
Belarus
Belgium
fall of France and
Bell, Daniel
Ben-Ami, Shlomo
Benedetti, Leonardo de.
Benedict (Pope)
Ben-Gurion, David
Benjamin, Walter
Bentley, Elizabeth
Bergen-Belsen
Berle, Adolf A., Jr.
Berlin
airlift ()
crisis ()
Berlin, Isaiah.
Berlinguer, Enrico
Berlin Wall
Berman, Paul.
Bernanos, Georges
Bernstein, Carl
Bernstein, Eduardn.
Bernstein, Leonard
Beschloss, Michael
Bessarabia.
Beveridge, William
Bhagwati, Jagdish.
Biological Weapons Convention
Birnbaum, Pierre
Bismarck, Otto von
Blair, Tony
Blake, George
Blanchard, Georges
Bloch, Ernst
Bloch, Marc
Blocher, Christoph
Blücher, Gebhard von
Blum éon
Blumenthal, Sidney
Blunt, Anthony
Boff, Leonardo
Bohlen, Charles
Bolshakov, Georgi.
Bolshevism.
Borkenau, Franz
Borochov, Ber
Borowski, Tadeusz
Bosnia.
Brandt, Willy
Brazil
Bread and Wine (Silone)
“Breakdown, The” (Kołakowski)
Brecht, Bertolt
Brezhnev, Leonid
“Bridge, The” (Levi)
Britain. See United Kingdom
British Communist Historians Group
British Communist Party
British National Party.
British Rail
Broadwater, Bowden
Brown, Gordon
Brussels
Brzozowski, Stanisław
Buber-Neumann, Margarete
Bucharest
Buckley, William F., Jr.
Bukharin, Nikolai
Bukovina.
Bulganin, Nikolai
Bulgaria
Bund
Bundy, Harvey.
Bundy, McGeorge ..
Bundy, William
Burgess, Guy
Burrin, Philippe
Bush, George H. W.
Bush, George W.
Europe and
liberals and
Caligula (Camus)
Calvino, Italo
Cambodia
Cambridge University .
Camus, Albert .
Canovan, Margaret.
Can You Hear Their Voices? (Chambers)
capitalism.
inequities of
John Paul on
Left’s reconciliation with
Marxism on
totalitarianism and
Western model of
Caradja, Princess Brianna
“Caritas” scam (Romania)
Carné, Marcel
Carnets (Camus)
Carter, Jimmy
Casey, William
Castro, Fidel.
Catholicism
Belgium and
Communist Secretariat compared with
France and
Poland and
Vatican and. See John Paul
Caute, David
Cavani, Liliana
Ceauşescu, Nicolae
Celan, Paul
Cesarani, David
Chamberlain, Neville
Chambers, Whittaker
Charter(Czechoslovakia)
Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU)
Chateaubriand, François-René de
Chechnya
Chernobyl disaster.
Chesterton, G. K.
Chiaromonte, Nicolà
Chiave a stella, La (Levi)
Children’s Rights Convention ()
Chile
China.
Communist takeover of
as potential great power
U.S. diplomatic opening with
U.S. similarities with
Christian Democrats
“Christianity and Revolution” (Arendt)
Churchill, Winston
CIA
Cioran, E. M.
class struggle
Clinton, Bill
Clubb, O. Edmund
coal mining
Cobbett, William
Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea
Cohn, Roy
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel
cold war
Cuban missile crisis and
détente and
Hiss-Chambers case and
illusions/errors about
John Paul /Reagan alliance and
Kissinger/Nixon policies and
legacies of
war on terror analogy with
See also Soviet Union
Cold War, The (Gaddis)
Colombia
colonialism
anticolonial violence and.
France and.
Israel and
Columbia University.
Comintern.
commemoration. See memorialization
Committee on the Present Danger
Common Agricultural Fund
Communism.
attraction of
Chambers-Hiss case and
failure of
Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment to
ideas and
intellectuals and
Jews and
Kissinger’s policymaking and
Koestler’s portrayal of
Marxism transformed into
messianism and
revisionist
state’s role in
totalitarianism and
See also anti-Communism; cold war; Marxism; under specific countries
Compagnon, Antoine
Congo
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Congress for Cultural Freedom
Congress of Bad Godesberg ()
Congress of Vienna ()
Constantinescu, Emil
Corap, André
Corbin, Alain
Cordier ploy.