Essays

On Judging American Foreign Policy: Human Rights, Political Realism, and the Arrogance of Power

By Stephen Eric Bronner
Posted in ,

Human rights and political realism offer two very different ways of approaching international affairs.[1] Here is not the place for an extended philosophical disquisition on the relationship between them, let alone their connection with the history of American foreign policy. Human rights and political realism have their unique traditions that are usually seen as starkly opposed…

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Bad I.O.U.: Badiou’s Fidelity to the Event

By John Clark
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1. Immortality For Badiou, our mystical participation in the heroic Event is our triumph over mortality. Badiou’s Ethics includes a sustained polemic against a contemporary ideology of human rights that juxtaposes the “passive, pathetic or reflexive subject,” the mere suffering victim, to the “active, determining subject of judgment” that fights on behalf of the hapless…

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Liberal Values in the Age of Interdependence

By Benjamin Barber
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In 1976, the great pragmatic American liberal James MacGregor Burns, who was a student of the Roosevelt Era, was elected (rather surprisingly) as president of the American Political Science Association. He asked two young scholars on the left to organize his annual program for the 1976 American Political Science Association, which coincided with the American…

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Anticapitalist Readings of Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Erich Fromm

By Michael Löwy
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This paper will try to analyze a curious intellectual phenomena: a group of Jewish-German authors that developed, during the Weimar Republic, a radical anti-capitalist and anti-protestant argument, directly inspired by Weber’s Protestant Ethic. They did not hesitate to denounce capitalism as a sort of diabolic religion (Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin), or as the product of…

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Modernism, Surrealism, and the Political Imaginary

By Stephen Eric Bronner
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Surrealism had the longest tenure of any avant-garde movement, and its members were arguably the most “political.”1 It emerged on the heels of World War I, when André Breton founded his first journal, Literature, and brought together a number of figures who had mostly come to know each other during the war years. They included…

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Capitalism, Identity, and Social Rights

By Stephen Eric Bronner
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Few questions of theory are as salient today as that of the relation between capitalism and social rights. Amid the rise of capitalism, during what became known as “the age of democratic revolution,” progressives placed primary upon constricting the arbitrary exercise of authority by defenders of “throne and altar” and the traditions associated with the…

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Chomsky’s Audience Problem: Is Anyone Listening?

By chrismorda
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The “audience question” within rhetoric and composition needs to be turned on it its head, re-examined in light of new and compelling evidence, and subjected to a new analysis—an analysis which might have far-reaching political implications for our very understandings of whether or not satisfying an audience’s psychological needs should necessarily be the foremost factor…

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Joseph Haydn Two Centuries Later

By David Schroeder
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Two hundred years after his death in May 1809, Joseph Haydn remains one of the least acclaimed of the great classical composers. Of course he faces stiff competition for recognition, especially from his immediate contemporaries. His friend twenty-four years his junior, Mozart, continues to engage us, and not only because of a fascination with extraordinary…

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Orwell and the British Left

By Ian Williams
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According to his own last words on the subject, just before his death, Orwell was a supporter of Socialism and of the British Labour Party which had swept to power in 1945. Before then, for most of his writing career, certainly from The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937 onwards, George Orwell was an avowed…

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The Fourth Estate in the Service of Power: Media Coverage of the Middle East

By Assaf Kfoury
Posted in ,

You open the newspaper on any day and you can be sure to find at least one front-page article related to the Middle East. It will be something ugly or depressing, something implicating the United States directly or indirectly — Israel and Palestine, the Iraq war, the standoff with Iran, the war in Afghanistan, the…

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Latest Issue

2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2

Latest Issue

2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2


Between The Issues