Among Western policymakers, it seems Suleiman remains a popular choice to replace Mubarak, as the candidate uniquely suited to maintaining Egypt’s current foreign policy, while also addressing domestic grievances expressed by protesters. That remains a distant prospect, given the unlikelihood that the Egyptian opposition would abandon its call to determine the nation’s role in regional affairs. But it also demonstrates that, unlike Tunisia, Egypt is far too critical to US objectives in the Middle East to be left to its own devices. Whatever the outcome in Egypt, it is clear that the recent revelations will have a dramatic impact on the settlement of the Palestinian question. Already weakened by the scandal of the Palestine Papers, Erekat may now have to do without the support of an Egyptian regime he termed, “our ally, our backbone”. In his first interview as vice-president, Suleiman decried as “unacceptable” what he called “foreign interference” in Egypt’s current turmoil. Coming from a regime whose ability to endure through the decades is owed largely to foreign interference, the irony of those words will not be lost on the Egyptian people.

more from Abdullah Al-Arian at Al Jazeera here.

A subterranean museum hewn from a sandstone cliff on an Australian island, founded by a maverick gambling millionaire, sounds like a far-fetched art world fantasy. Fill the gallery with some of the most provocative and striking art works of the 21st century, from a faeces-making machine by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye to Stephen Shanabrook’s mutilated body of a suicide bomber sculpted in chocolate, along with Egyptian mummies and modernist Australian pieces, and the saga sounds even more implausible. But such a place exists: the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), which opened outside the Tasmanian capital of Hobart late last month, houses the collection of 49-year-old David Walsh, mathematician, vineyard owner and professional gambler. At 6,000 square metres, it is Australia’s largest private art gallery. Walsh is quite unlike your typical art collector. Raised in the Hobart suburb of Glenorchy, the algorithms virtuoso says he was a “misfit kid”, a typical computer nerd. But the geek cleaned up, dropping out of the University of Tasmania in the late 1970s to fine-tune gaming systems, hitting on a formula that meant blackjack croupiers dreaded dealing him a hand (mastering card techniques was “easy”, he says, but finding a way to win on the horses took him most of the early 1990s).

more from Gareth Harris at the FT here.

Review here of a brilliant novel by a friend of ours here at 3QD, Rana Dasgupta. Truly an original work…

Most people die before they can witness the historical consequences of their actions. Ulrich, the 100-year-old Bulgarian man at the center of Rana Dasgupta’s new novel, “Solo,” is an exception: he is so ancient he lives in a state of perpetual, dazed aftermath. Once the manager of a chemical factory for the Communists, he watches as Bulgaria’s rivers start oozing familiar poisons: “Like all his compatriots, Ulrich had become chemical himself, his blood a solution of cadmium, lead, zinc and copper.” Soon after, Communism falls, multiplying the pointlessness of Ulrich’s life. The first half of “Solo” is a swift retelling of Bulgarian history through Ulrich’s many failures. When this story ends, we are abruptly introduced to Ulrich’s “Daydreams” — his “private fictions” that “have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense.” But these so-called dreams are in fact the ultramodern and well-researched tales of three young Eastern European characters trying to make it big in New York in the 2000s. They are only glancingly fabulist and tenuously linked to Ulrich’s experiences. “Solo” bills itself as a novel, but it is really two distinct novellas held together by the author’s interest in Bulgaria and Georgia.

more from Karan Mahajan at the NYT here.

From EmersonKent.com:

…Well, I am one who doesn't believe in deluding myself. I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn't need any legislation; you wouldn't need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn't be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don't have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American.

No, I'm not an American. I'm one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I'm not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I. I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare. These 22 million victims are waking up. Their eyes are coming open. They're beginning to see what they used to only look at. They're becoming politically mature. They are realizing that there are new political trends from coast to coast. As they see these new political trends, it's possible for them to see that every time there's an election the races are so close that they have to have a recount. They had to recount in Massachusetts to see who was going to be governor, it was so close. It was the same way in Rhode Island, in Minnesota, and in many other parts of the country. And the same with Kennedy and Nixon when they ran for president. It was so close they had to count all over again. Well, what does this mean? It means that when white people are evenly divided, and black people have a bloc of votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who's going to sit in the White House and who's going to be in the dog house.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Two centuries ago last month, a traveler making his way by boat down the Mississippi toward New Orleans would have come upon a ghastly sight: a severed human head rotting on the end of a pole. And no sooner would it vanish around a bend than another appeared along the levee. Then another, and another — and so on without respite for 40 long miles down to the city. What must it have been like to experience this? Did the horror build and build with each successive glimpse of those dreadful trophies? Or how many apparitions did it take — 10, 20, 100? — before they began to seem familiar milestones on the journey, ordinary features of the passing landscape? In a sense, those heads were totems of an all-too-commonplace aspect of the American scene: the landscape of slavery and white supremacy. Each one had been cut from the corpse of a black man killed for fighting to be free.

Early in January 1811, along the same riverbank, a small army of Louisiana slaves had briefly faced a small army of slaveholders. It was, as described in “American Uprising,” Daniel Rasmussen’s chilling and suspenseful account, the culmination of a signal episode in the history of American race relations. On a night just at the beginning of carnival season, black workers belonging to a planter named Manuel Andry broke into their master’s house armed with axes, machetes and sugar-cane knives. For Andry, surprised in his bedroom, it must have been the realization of every slaveholder’s worst fears. He managed to flee, but not before seeing his son Gilbert being hacked to pieces.

More here.

Protesters throughout the Middle East are using famous poetry as subversive chants against the government. Josh Dzieza on countries where verse still has power—and the Pete Seeger of Egypt.

To The Tyrant

Imperious despot, insolent in strife,
Lover of ruin, enemy of life!
You mock the anguish of an impotent land
Whose people’s blood has stained your tyrant hand,
And desecrate the magic of this earth,
sowing your thorns, to bring despair to birth,

Patience! Let not the Spring delude you now,
The morning light, the skies’ unclouded brow;
Fear gathers in the broad horizon’s murk
Where winds are rising, and deep thunders lurk;
When the weak weeps, receive him not with scorn—
Who soweth thorns, shall not his flesh be torn?

Wait! Where you thought to reap the lives of men,
The flowers of hope, never to bloom again,
Where you have soaked the furrows’ heart with blood,
Drenched them with tears, until they overflowed,
A gale of flame shall suddenly consume,
A bloody torrent sweep you to your doom!

by Abu ‘l-Qasim al-Shabbi
from Arabic Literature (in English)

Mujahid Kamran in The Express Tribune:

Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate Abdus Salam was born in Santok Das, District Sahiwal, on January 29, 1926 a little over 85 years ago. He shared the 1979 physics Nobel Prize with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow for the historic unification of the weak nuclear force with the electromagnetic force.

Salam had already become famous in British India as a very young record-breaking student from Jhang, where he grew up, when he arrived at Government College, Lahore in 1942 as a bachelor’s student. At Government College, too, he continued his record-breaking streak in every major exam and passed out with a Master’s in mathematics in 1946.

Salam arrived at Cambridge as a student of Tripos mathematics in September, 1946 with a three-year scholarship. He completed his mathematics Tripos in two years with a first class. His teacher, Fred Hoyle, one of the most renowned astrophysicists of the 20th century, advised him to do the two-year physics Tripos in one year “as a challenge”. A few others had achieved this feat, after having done a math Tripos in first class. The list included two Nobel laureates — Sir GP Thomson, the grandfather of the present British High commissioner to Pakistan, and Sir Nevil Mott. However, both had secured a second class in the physics Tripos. The challenge was to secure a double first class. Salam was, to the utter surprise of some of his teachers, able to secure a first class in the physics Tripos as well, while completing it in one year. This was a most unusual achievement.

Alan Posener in signandsight:

The French writer Pascal Bruckner wants to forbid a word. Which sounds more like a typically German obsession. But for Bruckner, “Islamophobia” is one of “those expressions which we dearly need to banish from our vocabulary”. One asks oneself with some trepidation which other words we “dearly need” to get rid of: Right-wing populism? Racism? Relativism?But let that ride. Bruckner's essay has the advantage of stating the case against “Islamophobia” clearly and concisely and thus allowing those who – like myself – propose to hang on to the word until a better one comes along to answer in a similar clear and concise way.

Let me present Bruckner's arguments in his own words:

“Iranian fundamentalists invented the word Islamophobia, formed in analogy to 'xenophobia', in the late seventies. The aim of this word is to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist.”

The argument that Islamists coined the phrase in order to portray any and all criticism of Islam as a symptom of illness (a phobia being an irrational fear), may be right or wrong. It is, however, irrelevant. Remember that the word “Antisemitism” was also coined by reactionaries who wanted to give their hatred of the Jews, inspired by Christian Antijudaism, a “scientific” gloss. In point of fact, the “Antisemites” never had anything against any other Semites (for instance Arabs), and their hatred was reserved for a people which (pace Thilo Sarrazin) was and is one of the world's most ethnically diverse. And yet we still use the expression today, and not only to characterize the ideology developed by its European inventors. For instance, few people today would hesitate to call Martin Luther an Antisemite, just because he knew nothing about race and genetics and therefore didn't call on pseudoscience to justify his murderous hatred of the Jews.

Leon Aron review's Lev Loseff's Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life in the Wall Street Journal:

The euphony of Brodsky's verse is irresistible in its ease and naturalness, and one finds oneself remembering lines and stanzas after no more than a couple of readings. “From the very beginning, as soon as it starts,” Isaiah Berlin wrote of Brodsky's poetry, “you are in the presence of genius. And that is a unique sort of feeling—being in the presence of genius.”

Alas, a reader without Russian has to take Berlin's word for it: Not even Brodsky himself managed to endow the English translations of his verses with the beauty and power of the originals (although he tried again and again, and the reader's indulgence of my translations above is begged). Without a fixed word order, auxiliary verbs such as “is” or “are” or articles, Russian offers little to impede the lyrical poet, and Brodsky rejoiced in this paradigmatically inflected language. Rich shades of emotions and meanings are conveyed by prefixes and suffixes. Myriad rhymes are generated almost spontaneously as the mostly polysyllabic nouns, verbs, adjectives and participles conjugate (that is, change their endings) in accordance with six cases and three genders. English, with its rigid order, shorter words and precious little change in word endings, is hardly a happy counterpart. “There is nothing odder,” Brodsky admitted, “than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon; for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.” The largely correct but hardly sparkling translation of Loseff's book and the Brodsky poems in translation that Loseff cites in his text prove this assertion right—yet again.

So non-Russian readers must settle for the next best thing: Brodsky's prose. The “English essayist” wrote widely about literature (Dante, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Horace, Mandelstam, Akhmatova). He meditated on exile and boredom; Rio and Venice; the muse and the beloved; memory as the closest substitute for love—among dozens of other matters. He managed to speak about all of this without a scintilla of pontification or superiority. Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor. (“In the country where I spent thirty-two years, adultery and moviegoing are the only forms of free enterprise.”) Paradoxes are tossed out with a Wilde-like elegance along with allusions, similes and metaphors galore—many stunningly unexpected and all completely and satisfyingly accurate. One constantly reaches for a pencil to mark particularly fetching sentences…

Stephen Metcalf in Slate:

In 1987, Toni Morrison's Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1992, with Beloved still widely regarded as her masterpiece, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Three legs make a stool: This past month, in a New York Times poll of 200 critics, writers, and editors, Beloved was named “the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years,” beating out novels by such luminaries as Roth, DeLillo, and Updike. I participated in this survey and can attest that, from the moment the solicitously hand-typed letter from the Times Book Review arrived in the mail, Beloved was the presumptive winner.

Like two other American novels devoted to race, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved exists wholly beyond its own artistic merits and demerits. These books have become something more than mere literature; they're homework, with an afterlife guaranteed by their place (or in the case of Huck Finn, its embattled absence) on the high-school and college syllabus. (“Only Shakespeare rivals her in the number of senior theses devoted to her work,” Harvard English professor Barbara Johnson has said.) Were it simply a matter of social redress, we could all go home now, the Dead White Males having been forced to cocktail with a Living Black Woman. But Beloved isn't solely a work of protest and advocacy, as Morrison herself has insisted, nor solely a symbol for the progress and virtue of the prestige-granting institutions in American letters. It's a serious novel and a work of art, and it deserves to be accorded the highest respect. It deserves, in other words, to be asked, Yes, but are you any good?

For those who haven't read it, Beloved tells the story of Sethe, an ex-slave who has resettled to the outskirts of Cincinnati with her daughter, Denver. Near the beginning of the book, the two are joined by Paul D, once Sethe's fellow slave on a Kentucky plantation called “Sweet Home.” (After years of thankless yearning, Paul D has at last become Sethe's lover.) It's 1873, the Civil War has been fought, and though slavery as a legal institution is over, it has only started its haunting of the African-American psyche. This Morrison dramatizes with the actual haunting of Sethe's house by Sethe's deceased baby daughter. We never learn that baby's given name, but in exchange for sex, Sethe has had a headstone carved for her girl, bearing the single word “Beloved.” Paul D exorcises the house of the ghost, but later, upon returning from a carefree day spent at a carnival, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D discover a young woman sleeping near the front door of their house. The young woman goes by the name Beloved, and from all appearances she is a revenant, the embodied spirit of Sethe's dead daughter.

Morrison presents Sethe's turbulent inner life through a process both Morrison and Sethe herself call “rememory,” a kind of psychic haunting in which the specifics of a traumatic incident are told and retold, even as the teller tries to block their full emergence into the conscious mind. The central traumatic episode of Beloved, to which the narrative returns again and again, is an infanticide: Twenty years earlier, Sethe beheaded her baby Beloved with a handsaw rather than allow her return to slavery. In Beloved, Morrison perfected a mode of narration, entirely her own but with roots in everything from the African griot to As I Lay Dying, built out of compulsive repetition, in which the onion, as it were, is constantly being both peeled and reconstituted; in which memories are constantly being both exhumed and buried; and in which the mind of the storyteller is both imprisoned and set free in the act of retelling. And so, like the return of Beloved, and the enduring curse of slavery itself, rememory is both a reconciliation and a vexation, both a healing and a wounding.

More here. (Note: In my opinion, Beloved ranks with Moby Dick in representing the best of American fiction. This is a good month to read or re-read this brilliant work of genius. Please do it.)

From Smithsonian:

The flat terrain and calm waters of Maryland’s Eastern Shore belie the dangers of the journeys escaping slaves made to reach freedom in the North. Burs from the forests’ sweet gum trees pierced the runaways’ feet; open water terrified those who had to cross it. As they crept over, around or through marshes and creeks and woodlands and fields, the fugitives relied on the help of Eastern Shore native Harriet Tubman and other conductors of the Underground Railroad resistance network. On previous trips to the Eastern Shore, I had biked sparsely traveled roads past farmland or sped by car to the resort beaches of the Atlantic. After reading James McBride’s novel Song Yet Sung, whose protagonist, Liz Spocott, is loosely based on Tubman, I returned for a weekend with book-club friends to explore places associated with Tubman’s life and legacy.

Most likely a descendant of the Ashanti people of West Africa, Tubman was born into slavery in 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, about 65 miles southeast of Washington, D.C. After nearly 30 years as a slave, she won her freedom in 1849 by slipping over the Mason-Dixon line, the border between free and slave states. Yet she returned to the Eastern Shore approximately 13 times over the next ten years to help other slaves flee north. Because of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which mandated the return of refugee slaves captured anywhere in the United States, Tubman brought escapees to Canada, becoming known as the “Moses of her people” during her lifetime. Along with helping to free about 70 family members and acquaintances, Tubman toiled as an abolitionist; a Union Army spy, nurse and teacher during the Civil War; and later a suffragist, humanitarian and community activist before she died, at age 91, in 1913. Now, Tubman is more famous than at any time in the past. The state of Maryland is planning a park named for her, and the National Park Service may follow suit.

More here.

3QD friend Graeme Wood reports about his experience in The Atlantic:

Egypt's cryptic new vice president, Omar Suleiman, is a man who chooses his words cautiously, if it counts as caution not to speak much at all. So when he said this afternoon that “foreign agents” might have instigated the demonstration against his boss Hosni Mubarak, he probably knew the consequences of his word choice. Today Egyptian state TV called out some of the enemy by name, positing a conspiracy between the Muslim Brotherhood (a major Egyptian element in the protests) and Qataris, who fund the pro-protester network Al Jazeera.

This morning I discovered other elements to this sinister imaginary cabal. At around eleven o'clock, after a walk around the area of downtown north of Tahrir, I got into a cab and headed toward the Nile. Three times I found the road blocked by armed men demanding to see my passport, and twice they let me through with the usual apology for having to waylay me. On the third of these, the man roared with delight at seeing my foreign passport and began flipping through it, his eyes drawn first to the stamps with Arabic script. He called over others, and within seconds at least a dozen men in plain clothes surrounded me, two locking my arms behind my back, another threading his fingers tightly through a beltloop, and all the rest hooting with delight at having caught a real Iranian spy.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

Throughout my time in Egypt I was struck by the uniformity of men's hairstyles: short, parted on the side, moustaches without beards. I couldn't detect the existence of even the most marginal fashion subculture, or of any diversity of taste or manner at all. This impression of homogeneity contrasted with the rich internal lives of the characters in Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, which I had bought at L'Orientaliste and had been reading during the trip.

At times it struck me that I would have felt I understood things better if I had remained content to read an Egyptian novel or two in Germany. The only encounters I had had in Egypt were these aggressive, almost menacing attempts at immediate friendship on the part of young Egyptian men. I have never been an easy friend to anyone, and I had no point of reference in my previous experience for what they seemed to be proposing.

I was not aware at the time that the superficial impressions I was forming were the superficial impressions of a dictatorship. There ought to be a word for it, oughtn't there: these oppressive regimes that nonetheless manage at the same time to convince Westerners that they stand for nothing so much as fun-and-sun (and perhaps a bit of edifying antiquity). It is interesting that the first two countries to catch fire in the wave of Arab revolutions currently underway, Tunisia and Egypt, are the two that have most successfully coupled base kleptocracy and pseudodemocracy with vapid and lucrative tourism industries.

More here.

Gal Beckerman in Forward:

In the 20th century, Jews created bombs. Weapons of mass destruction.

Most famously, there was J. Robert Oppenheimer who ran the Manhattan Project, which gave the world the atom bomb. After him came Edward Teller, the Hungarian Jew who engineered an incredibly destructive upgrade: the hydrogen bomb.

And then there was Samuel T. Cohen, the lesser-known Jewish physicist who rounds off this troika but whose invention, the neutron bomb, has been relegated to ignominy. Like the other two, Cohen, a Manhattan Project veteran, was present at the creation.

Cohen died last year on November 28 at the age of 89, and received the requisite New York Times obituary in recognition of his unique contribution to the technology of mass killing. But neither the Times nor other notices of Cohen’s death took note of the unique document that he left behind before he died: a no-holds-barred, angry memoir, titled “F*** You: Mr. President.”

It is an autobiography unlike anything ever published by a Manhattan Project insider. Cohen’s memoir lays bare a trove of revelations about the combustible mix of geniuses who came together for that historic enterprise — and self-revelations about Cohen’s own life and what motivated him to devote his career to wholesale death.

By the time of his demise, Cohen was a man made bitter by his frustrated legacy, by the fundamental disconnect between how he saw the neutron bomb, his prize creation — what he called “the most sane and moral weapon ever devised” — and the revulsion with which the world received it.

More here.

Basharat Peer in The Caravan:

As its title might suggest, Patrick French’s India: A Portrait—An Intimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People takes the form of a broad survey, but its most powerful sections come when it shifts from a wide canvas to the detailed stories of individual Indians. The heart of French’s book is the tangled story of India’s contemporary politics and the country’s rapid economic transformation in the past two decades.

One of the main critiques of economic liberalisation in India has been that although the reforms provided economic opportunities to millions and created a new middle class and a new elite, hundreds of millions remained left behind. The most visible sign of this incomplete economic miracle has been the crisis in the agricultural sector, painfully visible in the shocking epidemic of farmer suicides (now immortalised in the figure of Natha, the protagonist in Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live). The indisputable scale of the crisis led the government to introduce the landmark National Rural Employment Guarantee Act—one of the most laudable applications of John Maynard Keynes’ idea of government spending as a force for economic stimulus.

French uses Keynes’ personal engagement with India—including his stint at the India Office in London, his early writings on India and the effects of his ideas on India’s first generation of policymakers—to tell the backstory of the nation’s economy. Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of independent India believed, with good reason, that the draining of India’s resources by the colonial administration had impoverished India. “They disliked the way that for nearly a century India had been importing large quantities of foreign manufactured goods rather than making them indigenously,” French writes, “and Nehru himself thought that international trade was a ‘whirlpool of economic imperialism’.” But after two decades of independence, India’s economic problems were not going away: the new order evolved into a labyrinthine and corrupt bureaucracy, and even the most ambitious state-run enterprises were making colossal losses.

More here.

Vijay Prashad in CounterPunch:

From inside the bowels of Washington's power elite, Frank Wisner emerges, briefcase in hand. He has met the President, but he is not his envoy. He represents the United States, but is not the Ambassador. What is in his briefcase is his experience: it includes his long career as bagman of Empire, and as bucket-boy for Capital. Pulling himself away from the Georgetown cocktail parties and the Langley Power-point briefings, Wisner finds his way to the Heliopolis cocktail parties and to the hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya. Mubarak (age 82) greets Wisner (age 72), as these elders confer on the way forward for a country whose majority is under thirty.

Obama came to Cairo in 2009, and said, “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.” Those words should have been cast in gold and placed in the portico of the White House. Instead, they drift like wisps in the wind, occasionally sighted for propaganda purposes, but in a time of crisis, hidden behind the clouds of imperial interests (or those of Tel Aviv). America presumes to know, and presumes to have a say equivalent to those of the millions who have thronged Egypt's squares, streets and television sets (one forgets about the protests of the latter, too tired to get to the square, nursing sick children or adults, a bit fearful, but no less given over to anger at the regime).

The Republicans have their own ghouls, people like James Baker, who are plucked out for tasks that require the greatest delicacy. They are like diplomatic hit-men, who are not sown up by too much belief in the values of democracy and freedom, but to the imperatives of “stability” and Empire. The Democratic bench is lighter now, as the immense bulk of Richard Holbrooke has departed for other diplomatic assignments. He had been given charge of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he found little traction. The Taliban could not be cowered, and nor would the Pakistani military. Holbrooke had much easier times in the Balkans, where, according to Diana Johnstone, he instigated the conflict by refusing the road of peace. Wisner comes out of the same nest as Holbrooke. He is the Democrat's version of James Baker, but without the pretend gravity of the Texan.

John Summers in Dissent:

Once upon a time, ideologies told us what mattered. “A total ideology,” Bell explained in his most famous book,

is an all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality, it is a set of beliefs, infused with passion, and seeks to transform the whole of a way of life. This commitment to ideology—the yearning for a ‘cause,’ or the satisfaction of deep moral feelings—is not necessarily the reflection of interests in the shape of ideas. Ideology, in this sense, and in the sense that we use it here, is a secular religion.

It was this large conception, and not “the particular conception of ideology” behind particular issues and groups, that Bell addressed. And it was Marxian socialism, not any other ideology, that his book eulogized.

Nobody could doubt the acuity of Bell’s mind. But what can explain the long influence of a loosely organized collection of essays arguing a narrowly conceived thesis on the death of an ideology that has never been very important in the United States?

Timing, for one thing. The End of Ideology announced the end of a thirty-year nightmare dark with fanatics, apostles, and messiahs whom history had exposed as demagogues and monsters. The phrase “end of ideology” first entered widely into English circulation in 1955, between Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing him. That year the Congress for Cultural Freedom met in Milan, Italy, in a conference that featured Bell, Raymond Aron, Seymour Martin Lipset, and other end-of-ideologists. Edward Shils, also attending, reported a mood proud with vindication. “Have the Communists come to appear so preposterous to our Western intellectuals that it is no longer conceivable that they could be effectively subversive?” Shils wondered. “Is it now thought that there is no longer any danger of the working classes in the advanced Western countries falling for their propaganda?”

The danger lying in the past, Bell exorcised the ghost. He confirmed the generation of the 1930s in its repudiation of youthful idealism by baring “the ambiguities of theory,” “the complexities of life,” and “the exhaustion of utopia,” as he titled his book’s three sections. In the 1970s and 1980s, another generation of disenchanted radicals cottoned to the book’s skepticism. By 1995, when the TLS memorialized it alongside Friedrich von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, the Soviet Union had failed in fact as well as in spirit. Events seemed to have proven Bell correct.

What is the legacy of The End of Ideology today? I think it lies in the sober, anti-romantic, wiser-than-thou style of political analysis and leadership on display on the night of January 25, hours after Bell died, in Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech.

Samantha Balaton-Chrimes in openDemocracy:

The uprisings we have witnessed in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen over the last few weeks are moving examples of the great potential of the human condition, and of political activity that deserves our praise and admiration. The political theory of Hannah Arendt, whose dissection of totalitarianism, and prescription of popular politics as its remedy, remains one of the most profound works on the topic, and is particularly prescient to the current North African uprisings (see The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1973).

Arendt believed that what distinguishes humans from other animals, what constitutes the human condition, is our capacity for natality, that is, our capacity to ‘begin anew’, to ‘think what we are doing’, and to do things that have never been done before (see The Human Condition, 1958/1998). Moreover, for Arendt, when people act in concert, and in public, the only thing that can be properly defined as power is manifest. In the process of understanding domination and totalitarianism, Arendt became the great theorist of power and resistance and located these at the heart of what it means to be human (see On Violence, 1970).

In the Arab world today we are being treated to daily demonstrations of resistance of this kind, as ordinary citizens are gathering together with a common purpose, that is, to express their grievances and demands. They gather not as small groups around kitchen tables, as has gone on for decades, but en masse in the streets of Sidi Bouzid and all over Tunisia; in Tahrir (Liberation) Square in Cairo; in the streets of Amman in Jordan and Sanaa in Yemen. By gathering in such a way that their deeds and words are seen and taken seriously by each other, citizens augment their individual influence and elevate it to the status of power, a status that can never be achieved when individuals act alone. Though Arendt never got to see anything like it, the public that these citizens are appealing to goes far beyond their co-citizens, and reaches out instead – instantly and with overwhelming amounts of information from almost all perspectives – to a global public.

Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books:

[T]he problem with Mad Men is that it suffers from a hypocrisy of its own. As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust and hourglass hips, as it languorously follows the swirls of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, as the clinking of ice in the glass of someone’s midday Canadian Club is lovingly enhanced, you can’t help thinking that the creators of this show are indulging in a kind of dramatic having your cake and eating it, too: even as it invites us to be shocked by what it’s showing us (a scene people love to talk about is one in which a hugely pregnant Betty lights up a cigarette in a car), it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us, too. For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us anything of real substance about the world it depicts.

Most of the show’s flaws can, in fact, be attributed to the way it waves certain flags in your face and leaves things at that, without serious thought about dramatic appropriateness or textured characterization. (The writers don’t really want you to think about what Betty might be thinking; they just want you to know that she’s one of those clueless 1960s mothers who smoked during pregnancy.) The writers like to trigger “issue”-related subplots by parachuting some new character or event into the action, often an element that has no relation to anything that’s come before. Although much has been made of the show’s treatment of race, the “treatment” is usually little more than a lazy allusion—race never really makes anything happen in the show.