Essays

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

I) Ahmadinejad and Holocaust Denial On September 18th 2009 the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech, in the form of a Friday sermon, on the occasion of Al-Quds, or Jerusalem Day in Iran. Based on a translation of the original radio broadcast (not the official Farsi version issued by the government) here is some…

In October of 1985, as a twenty-five-year-old graduate student, I went to East Germany for a nine-month study visit. I stayed in East Germany until the end of July, 1986. My visit was made possible by an organization called the “Liga für Völkerfreundschaft,” which can be roughly translated as “League for International Friendship.” This was…