Peter Berkowitz

Colleges foster smugness on the left and resentment on the right.

Study of the humanities has never been more important to the welfare of the nation. Information whizzes by at breakneck speed. The contest between conservative and progressive visions of government’s scope and aim in a free society implicates rival understandings of human nature. The ways of life…

Corporate governance is a much-discussed topic, and the operation of corporations has proven a fertile field for investigative journalism. But even though many colleges and universities are multibillion-dollar-a-year operations, the subject of university governance has been largely neglected. This…

The City of Man

To the astonishment of friends and foes of Israel alike, on April 1 in the Washington Post, Justice Richard Goldstone reversed himself. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu promptly demanded that the United Nations retract the Goldstone Report, which, following its publication in September…

To the astonishment of friends and foes of Israel alike, on April 1 in the Washington Post, Justice Richard Goldstone reversed himself. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu promptly demanded that the United Nations retract the Goldstone Report, which, following its publication in September…

On Oct. 22, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, among our most knowledgeable progressive political commentators, published a courteous rebuttal, “Debating the Tea Party: A Reply to Peter Berkowitz,” to my recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Why Liberals don’t get the Tea Party Movement.”  The…

Tel Aviv

Reappraising the Right

Beirut

Tel Aviv

On July 29, 1981, barely six months into his presidency and in the face of an economic crisis of historic proportions, Ronald Reagan succeeded in persuading both houses of Congress to pass dramatic tax cuts that set the stage for nearly three decades of vigorous economic growth. In doing so, he…

On July 29, 1981, barely six months into his presidency and in the face of an economic crisis of historic proportions, Ronald Reagan succeeded in persuading both houses of Congress to pass dramatic tax cuts that set the stage for nearly three decades of vigorous economic growth. In doing so, he…

Liberty and Tyranny

In discharging their constitutional duty to provide advice and, if they deem appropriate, give consent to President Barack Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Senators should examine the critical importance the president attaches to empathy as a judicial virtue and to…

Tel Aviv

The Future of Liberalism

As candidate and as president, Barack Obama has presented himself as a postpartisan pragmatist. He has generally refrained from speaking in explicitly ideological terms, and earned a reputation as a silver-tongued orator. Yet on important issues he has seemed anything but pragmatic, adopting…

Kuwait City

Tel Aviv

In August 2004, a then-obscure Illinois state senator delivered a dazzling keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. Of special interest, because it departed from the election season's bitter partisanship, was his eloquent insistence on the unity undergirding the nation's great…

Save the World on Your Own Time

Three lawsuits--against Dartmouth College and Duke and Princeton universities--may be the best things to happen to higher education in decades. The Dartmouth suit, though recently withdrawn, focused attention on the role of alumni in college affairs. The Duke case raises the question of the extent…

Herzliya, Israel

Herzliya Pituach, Israel

Democracy's Good Name

Alan Wolfe is a distinguished public intellectual. He is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. He is a longtime contributing editor to the New Republic. He is a frequent contributor to the Sunday New York Times Book…

Herzliya Pituach, Israel

Neoconservatism

Not a Suicide Pact

CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS'S UNANIMOUS opinion for the Supreme Court in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Individual Rights, upholding the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment against challenge by a coalition of law schools and law faculties, decisively resolved the essential legal issues…

The significance of Lawrence Summers's resignation under fire as president of Harvard University has been widely misunderstood. Oozing sympathy for a beleaguered and aggrieved Harvard faculty, the Boston Globe editorial page argued that because he was "arrogant" and "brusque," in short a "bully,"…

Tel Aviv

THE POST-SHARON ERA began abruptly on January 5, when the 77-year-old prime minister of Israel suffered a massive stroke while visiting his beloved ranch in the northern Negev. By the time Sharon reached the hospital, the bleeding in his brain had already made a return to government for the true…

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY that the government is presented with an opportunity to educate the nation, fortify national security, and enhance public diplomacy, and to do so with a simple program that can be administered with a tiny staff and implemented at bargain prices. Yet the establishment of a program…

ON JUNE 29, in its comfortable Watergate suite, the Kuwait Information Office hosted a lunch in honor of its National Assembly's historic May 16 decision to grant women the right to vote and run for office. Granted, the very idea of a government ministry devoted to the regulation and dissemination…

Kuwait City, Kuwait

LOCAL CRITICS HAVE FOUND IN President Bush's second inaugural address an excellent opportunity to remonstrate, revile, and ridicule the president. Only they've had to rewrite the speech to do it.

Herzliya, Israel

ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, November 3, the day after the election, in front of an exhausted crowd of ardent supporters at the Ronald Reagan building, President Bush embraced victory, thanked those who had stood with him, and reaffirmed his commitment to reform the tax code, repair social security,…

GIVEN his constitutional role as commander in chief, with principal responsibility for the nation's security, the president might be expected to overreach occasionally in times of war, to place the energetic defense of the country ahead of the meticulous safeguarding of civil liberties. Equally,…

ISRAELI JEWS prefer not to talk about the so-called demographic problem--the challenge of maintaining a Jewish majority in their country while honoring the rights of its large and growing Arab minority. Which is understandable. The very term conjures up illiberal images of a government classifying…

Jerusalem

Tel Aviv

Jerusalem

Kuwait City, Kuwait

Kuwait City

BACK IN THE LATE 1980S, several of my Yale Law School classmates and I launched into yet another earnest and well-meaning discussion about racial diversity. On that particular evening we turned to the faculty and proceeded empirically. As we counted the individuals of minority race, I casually…

THE NEW YORK TIMES, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of…

LAST DECEMBER, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, former President Jimmy Carter linked the United States' responsibility to lead the world in implementing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, passed last November, more than a decade after Iraq's unlawful invasion and annexation of…

JOHN RAWLS, who died on November 24 at age eighty-one, was the towering figure of academic liberalism. A gentle, dignified, self-effacing man, he taught philosophy at Harvard for more than thirty years and exerted a commanding influence on his profession, single-handedly shifting its dominant…

JERUSALEM

THE UNITED STATES Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris upholding the constitutionality of the Ohio school voucher program was not really as close as it seems, at least not if the quality of the constitutional arguments of the majority is weighed against the quality of the…

Liberal Pluralism The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice by William A. Galston Cambridge University Press, 152 pp., $19 AMONG ACADEMIC LIBERALS and professional political theorists, William Galston is exemplary. In several fine books, he has undertaken extensive…

Charters, Vouchers, and Public Education edited by Paul E. Peterson and David E. Campbell Brookings, 320 pp., $42.95 Revolution at the Margins The Impact of Competition on Urban School Systems by Frederick M. Hess Brookings, 268 pp., $18.95 Rhetoric versus Reality What We Know and What We Need to…

FREE SPEECH, fair process, and judicial independence are under assault in Massachusetts. What makes the attack peculiarly insidious is that it is being led by the commonwealth's highest court. Unavoidably, courts must occasionally rule in cases involving alleged judicial misconduct. In such cases,…

Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy by Jean Bethke Elshtain Basic, 336 pp., $28 The Jane Addams Reader edited by Jean Bethke Elshtain Basic, 432 pp., $20 JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, intends…

ONE OF the reasons Bush v. Gore won't go away is that its scholarly critics--who are numerous, influential, and vehement--won't let it. Many of the biggest guns in the business--Yale's Bruce Ackerman, Harvard's Alan Dershowitz, New York University's Ronald Dworkin--weighed in early and denounced…

IN RESPONSE TO SEPTEMBER 11, people from many walks of life performed their jobs with spirit and guts and aplomb. Exhibiting a high degree of seriousness and professionalism, the police and the firefighters, the doctors and nurses, the ground zero construction crews and the media, the mayor and the…

ALAN WOLFE, A DISTINGUISHED SOCIOLOGIST and public intellectual, has been asking ordinary Americans about virtue. For his recent book Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice, Wolfe and his research team interviewed individuals in communities around the country and from all walks…

The Trouble with Principle

The Betrayal of Liberalism

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Leo Strauss