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Cosmopolitan Dream

From the May 2016 Print Edition

The Lure of Technocracyby jürgen habermastranslated by ciaran croninpolity, 200 pages, $22.95 The European project, as it is called, is marked by great promise and great peril. No less than ­Winston Churchill called for the reconciliation of a “spiritually great France” and a “spiritually . . . . Continue Reading »

Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel

From the May 2015 Print Edition

It is not uncommon for readers of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s final novel, The Red Wheel, to draw comparisons with another Russian masterpiece, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Like its predecessor, The Red Wheel is a massive, sweeping work, six thousand pages divided into four . . . . Continue Reading »

Clarifying War

From the December 2011 Print Edition

Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II by michael burleigh harper, 672 pages, $29.99 World War II—the bloody denouement of the “Thirty Years War” of the first half of the twentieth century—is in the popular imagination a “good war,” but the English historian Michael . . . . Continue Reading »

Tsars & Commissars

From the May 2006 Print Edition

The Soviet Union was the world’s first experiment in totalitarianism, the twentieth century’s contribution to the political experience of humankind. That particular system, with its numerous offshoots and satellites, lasted more than seventy years and wreaked havoc on a third of the human race. . . . . Continue Reading »