Review Essays

Rüdiger Safranski, Goethe – Life as a Work of Art. Liveright, 2017.   Goethe is too little known in the US and UK despite the existence for over two hundred years of excellent translations, some of the earliest by women (Sarah Austin and Anna Swanwick). Even the best book on Goethe and England (by Jean-Marie Carré,…

In a new volume titled WikiLeaking: The Ethics of Secrecy and Exposure, editors Christian Cotton and Robert Arp collect eighteen short essays intending to explore a series of moral questions regarding secrecy, transparency, concealment, and disclosure using WikiLeaks as their heuristic. Written in the style of the “Philosophy and Pop Culture” anthologies one finds at…

Poking around a used book store during my third year of college, I came across a copy of Michael Walzer’s 1980 essay collection Radical Principles. Walzer’s name was familiar: I had browsed Dissent, the journal he edited, in the college library, and my social theory professor had assigned an essay from that book, a critique…

This is a dispiriting book. How could it not be, arriving as it did—upon a scene already deeply etched by “economic, political, and cultural and not least ecological ” (p. 255)—amidst a pandemic of unfathomable personal, social, and economic consequences in the face of which the political leaderships of some of the world’s most vainglorious…