Monthly Archives: December 2006

Dworkin on democracy

This review of Ronald Dworkin’s book Is Democracy Possible Here? (the “here” being the US) will appear in the next issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine.
Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate, Princeton University Press, £12.95/$19.95 (hb)
Ten years ago, the political philosopher Michael Sandel published a book entitled Democracy’s Discontent. American [...]

The limits of necessary disrespect

There’s a lovely piece (subscriber-only I fear) by James Wood in the New Republic on the limits of atheistic disrespect. It’s ostensibly a review of Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, which I haven’t read, but makes some more general points about what Wood calls “public atheistic critique”. To this end, he [...]

Les Bienveillantes

The rentrée littéraire season in Paris in 2006 was notable for the number of prizes awarded to novels by writers whose first language isn’t French. The anglophone Canadian writer Nancy Huston won the Prix Femina, while the Prix Renaudot went to Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese-born novelist who lives in the US. But the most newsworthy [...]

On John Updike

When he reviewed Salman Rushdie’s novel Shalimar the Clown for the New Yorker last year, John Updike praised Rushdie for ‘animat[ing] Islam’s tenacious rage with faces and life stories.’ In Rushdie’s book, the eponymous protagonist, a Kashmiri circus performer, is cuckolded when his wife runs off with the former American ambassador to India. Shalimar swears [...]