As this rich anthology shows, the debate over the meaning, viability and political effectiveness of liberalism continues—and...
What is liberalism? One magazine has grappled with that question for a century.
In 1914, the New Republic was founded by a group of well-heeled, well-educated progressives eager for political and social change. “The magazine,” writes its current editor, Foer (How Football Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, 2004, etc.), “was born wearing an idealistic face. It soon gathered all the enthusiasm for reform and gave it coherence, and intellectual heft.” This collection amply testifies to that intellectual heft: Writers include Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, W.H. Auden, Reinhold Niebuhr, Andrew Sullivan and Irving Howe, arguing against “the ludicrousness of political correctness.” Organized by decade, the essays ring in on urgent issues: In 1917, for example, philosopher John Dewey argued against “isolated national sovereignty,” reflecting the views of the magazine’s hawkish editor, Willard Straight, and many liberals who believed war “would stir new feelings of community and connectedness.” The 1920s featured essays by Margaret Sanger (“The Birth Control Raid”), John Maynard Keynes on Soviet Russia; and Bruce Bliven on liberals’ despair over the Sacco and Vanzetti case. In the 1930s, Edmund Wilson reported on the effects of the Depression. At the time, under the desultory editorship of Michael Straight, the magazine “despised” Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the 1940s, Lewis Mumford lambasted the “weakness and confusion and self-betrayal of liberalism.” Liberals, he wrote, by opposing America’s entry into the second war raging in Europe, “no longer act as if justice mattered, as if the truth mattered, as if right mattered, as if humanity as a whole were any concern of theirs: the truth is they no longer dare to act.” Nearly 40 years later, Daniel Moynihan, considering “The Liberals’ Dilemma,” quoted Renata Adler: “Sanity…is the most profound moral option of our time.”
As this rich anthology shows, the debate over the meaning, viability and political effectiveness of liberalism continues—and not only in the pages of the New Republic.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062340405
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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