Contributions by:
Geoffrey Kurtz
Revolutions are not child’s play, nor are they academic debates in which only vanities are hurt in furious clashes, nor literary jousts wherein only ink is spilled profusely. Revolution means war, and that implies the destruction of men and things. -Mikhail Bakunin, quoted in Paul Berman,Quotations from the Anarchists (1972) There are two reasons to…
Imperialism used to be a theory; today, it is a rhetoric. The word shadows us wherever we go: on placards at anti-war demonstrations, sprinkled through the pages of left publications, and sprouting up in one conversation after another. Few seem to have noticed that the word has left behind the precise meanings it had several…
If two books constitute a trend, then these two announce a shift toward a new political style on the American left: a style that is simultaneously lively and lonely, furious and vacuous. This style has precedents, but it is unique in the way it synthesizes existing themes, and it marks a break with the approaches…
Just as the building trades workers’ attack on New York anti-war demonstrators in May 1970 came to symbolize the gulf between labor and the new social movements, the November 1999 Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization now evoke the hope of cooperation between them. Bringing together blue-collar union members, environmentalists costumed as sea turtles,…
Benjamin Franklin recounts in his Autobiography that during his years as a printer’s apprentice he developed a “bookish inclination” and a fondness for “the arts of rhetoric and logic.” He writes: About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them.…
Books Reviewed in this Essay: Lane Kenworthy. Social Democratic America. Oxford University Press, 2014. James Cronin, George Ross, and James Shoch, eds. What’s Left of the Left: Democrats and Social Democrats in Challenging Times. Duke University Press, 2011. What use might the European tradition of social democracy be to the American left? Lane Kenworthy’s answer…
There is something way too flat about horizontalism. The political style associated with Occupy Wall Street has its defenders, including writers like Marianne Maeckelbergh and David Graeber, who find something lively and colorful in the horizontalist enthusiasm for long consensus-seeking meetings, rejection of “vertical” structures like representation or formal leadership, and conviction that a group’s…
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…
