Fierce and elegant, Lévy’s musings will be of profound interest to any reader of modern continental philosophy.
The renowned French philosopher and activist delivers an intellectual biography-cum-manifesto that demands that we face and document the world’s horrors.
“What leads me to throw myself once again into this mess or that inferno?” So ponders Lévy, fondly known in France as BHL and a familiar presence on TV and in the pages of newspapers in a country that takes big ideas and thinkers more seriously than the U.S. The author advocates for politically engaged journalism that does not pretend to objectivity. The writer, he insists, must make a stand in the face of genocide, fundamentalist intolerance, and other assaults on human rights and democracy. Unafraid to be controversial, Lévy demands a new internationalism, which he distinguishes from globalism, and a cosmopolitanism that must be reformed with nuance. “I would keep the word but only after making it sing with the voices of the excluded, those we now refer to, in today’s democracies, as migrants, immigrants, foreigners without and foreigners within.” The author is always willing to put his life where his mouth is. For example, in 1971, he was on the scene in Bangladesh as it struggled for independence, advocating then and at many points since a kind of International Brigade of fighters who, like those in the Spanish Civil War, would battle against fascism. Lévy is a suggestive and allusive writer. Next to such militant pronouncements, for instance, he employs classical literature to discuss two types of traveling: “The voyage of Ulysses, or that of Aeneas. The voyager who thinks of nothing but his return, or the one who is constantly departing.” As for today, Lévy scorns those who have abandoned travel because of the heavy carbon footprint it entails. We must go out to see the world, and we have to fight for it while making of our travels “a poetic adventure in which the stake is, by traveling through space, to exert opposition until time bends.”
Fierce and elegant, Lévy’s musings will be of profound interest to any reader of modern continental philosophy.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-300-26055-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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