Jan 30, 2008

Wednesday Notes

by Cliopatria

Barnaby Rogerson,"Tariq Ramadan's act of piety," TLS, 23 January, reviews Ramadan's The Messenger: The meanings of the life of Muhammad. In Joan Acocella's"A Better Place," New Yorker, 4 February, David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215 gets another tough review.

Tony Judt,"The ‘Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe," NYRB, 14 February, is adapted from his lecture at Bremen, Germany, on November 30, 2007, when Judt was awarded the 2007 Hannah Arendt Prize.

Scott Horton,"Will the Real Leo Strauss Please Stand Up?" Harper's, 21 January, looks at Harvey Mansfield's recent defense of Strauss from the criticism in Eugene Sheppard's Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile.

Sean Wilentz,"Competing Visions of the Presidency," Washington Monthly, January, sees three types of presidencies in the 20th century: strong presidency, advisory presidency, and engineer's presidency. You can guess what candidates look good in this typology.

Finally, Margaret Soltan and Eugene Volokh continue their righteous indictment of the speech code at Brandeis. You get your choice of bemused contempt of it or straightforward anger at it.

More Comments:

HAVH Mayer - 1/31/2008

"You can guess what candidates look good in [Wilents's] typology" -- not really. Of the four surviving contenders, Romney's certainly an engineer type (bad); Wilentz thinks Obama is too, but I don't see it at all. McCain? He's running as "strong," but does Wilentz think he'd be "advisory" in office? Clinton is the one candidate who has brought her advisors to the fore -- does that make her "advisory"? Or is she "strong" because she was first lady? Who knows?

Kevin C. Murphy - 1/31/2008

The Wilentz piece should help in an essay I've been working on myself: "Competing Visions of the Historical Profession." Right now I'm working with three groups: "good" historians, "ambitious" historians, and "straw men" historians.