politics Dec/Jan 2016

Bureaucrats at the Brink

If we accept the description of war that emerged from the trenches of World War I—“boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror”—then the Cold War, despite appearances, really was a war. It was the most destructive thing the human race had ever contemplated. The Soviet Union had forty-three thousand nuclear warheads, the United States roughly the same. These weapons were many times more powerful than the bombs with which the US leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

And yet the Cold War was boring, too. World War I rhetoric was elegiac, about the lamps going out across Europe. World War II

print Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

Dutch Renaissance

“HE WORE A PURPLE PLAID SUIT his staff abhorred and a pinstripe shirt and polka-dot tie and a folded white silk puffing up extravagantly out of his pocket.” This was not some tea-sipping Edwardian dandy. It was Ronald Reagan announcing his presidential candidacy at the National Press Club in November 1975, as described by the historian Rick Perlstein. Back then, Reagan was, to most people, a novelty candidate, with a bit of the fop or eccentric about him. Political affinities and antipathies have since hardened into a useful but wholly unreliable historical “truth” about Reagan’s political

politics Feb/Mar 2013

Minding the Market

In the 1970s and ’80s, the world’s most advanced economies were reconstructed on the basis of principles that had until recently been thought the “prattle of outmoded cranks,” as the Johns Hopkins historian Angus Burgin puts it. But the cranks had a point, and in The Great Persuasion, Burgin gives a sympathetic account of how they went about making it. When John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory appeared in 1936, it won the apostleship of an entire rising generation of economists and the allegiance of Western policy makers. Only in a few isolated redoubts—notably the London School of Economics

print Summer 2011

The Strenuous Life

I.

Last year, Karl Zéro, the madcap newsman/comedian who has been a fixture on French television for a decade, asked the sixty-one-year-old celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy why people hated him so. Perhaps, Zéro speculated, it had to do with dual identity. There was Bernard-Henri Lévy, who launched his career in the 1970s with La Barbarie à visage humain (Barbarism with a Human Face), an attack on Communism, and who in the decades since had written three dozen more books, most of them about current affairs, and many of them best sellers. Then there was BHL (“Bay-Arsh-Ell”), as

culture May 09, 2011

The Strenuous Life: How Bernard-Henri Levy fought his way into chronic interventionism

Last year, Karl Zéro, the madcap newsman/comedian who has been a fixture on French television for a decade, asked the sixty-one-year-old celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy why people hated him so.

Last year, Karl Zéro, the madcap newsman/comedian who has been a fixture on French television for a decade, asked the sixty-one-year-old celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy why people hated him so.

Christopher Caldwell is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (Doubleday, 2009).