Paul Berman

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1 Biography
2 Journalism
3 Bibliography
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Paul Berman is a prominent liberal American intellectual. He is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, a professor of journalism and distinguished writer in residence at New York University, a member of the editorial board of Dissent and the author of many books and articles, including A Tale of Two Utopias and Terror and Liberalism.

These works are primarily efforts to trace the development of sets of political ideas. In Terror and Liberalism, Berman suggests that the appeal of totalitarian movements emanated from liberalism's apparent failure in the aftermath of the First World War. Movements like Fascism, Nazism, Falangism, and Communism all share, according to Berman, two essential similarities. Firstly, they envision themselves as a force being attacked by barbarians who can only be defended by the internal purification of the movement. Berman sees the Communist striving for ideological purity, the Falangist pursuit of religious purity, and the Nazi pursuit of racial purity as being related efforts in this regard. Together with this purifying impulse, Berman argues that these totalitarian movements are also related by a similar nihilist strand.

Berman then tries to trace these commonalities between the various totalitarian ideologies into the modern Islamic world. He splits Islamic thought into two broad categories: Pan-Arabism and Islamic fundamentalism. Pan-Arabist movements like the Ba'ath Party, he suggests, was influenced by traditional European totalitarian thought. In the Islamic fundamentalist movement, Berman sees the re-emergence of the nihilist strand in the form of suicide bombings and the celebration of martyrdom.

In a Tale of Two Utopias and Power and the Idealists, Berman attempts to trace the development of the so-called Generation of 1968 (of which he was a member) from those heady early days until today. He suggests that many of those idealists determined that packaged together with their liberal ideals in this movement were decidedly disturbing elements. Joschka Fischer, for example, the 1968 activist who would later become the leader of the German Green Party and Foreign Minister, decided that there was in fact the presence of anti-Semitic impulses in this movement when he saw a fellow activist participate in the hijacking of an Israeli plane to Antebi. There, in stark fashion it would be revealed that the hijackers split the passengers by religion, with Jews on the one side and non-Jews on the other, with the intention to kill all of the former. Similarly, Berman tracks major figures like Bernard Kouchner - the later founder of Doctors Without Borders - as a former member of the 1968 Generation who would later privilege active improvement of human rights to political goals.

At the close of the book, Berman considers the effect of the war in Iraq on these graduates of '68. He suggests that the war split the movement greatly, with many now deeply aware of the dramatic excesses of the regime of Saddaam Hussein, as well as the negative potential that might ensue if such a dictator remained in power. Nonetheless, they were deeply concerned by the arguments offered by the Bush Administration.

Though his fellow activists were split, Berman argues that military action in Afghanistan and Iraq was ultimately justified by the doctrine of "liberal interventionism" - intervention to safeguard and promote liberal democratic freedoms. Though some have grouped Berman with neo-conservatives for these positions, a proper analysis of his work illustrates he is more closely aligned with traditional liberal internationalism than neo-conversative thought. This explains the disdain for the neo-conservative policies of George W. Bush that runs throughout Berman's work.

[edit] Journalism

Berman has reported on Nicaragua's civil wars, Mexico's elections, and the Czech Republic's Velvet Revolution.

[edit] Bibliography

Berman, Paul (1996). A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968. W W Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-03927-7.
Berman, Paul (2003). Terror and Liberalism. W W Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-05775-5.
Berman, Paul (2005). Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath. Soft Skull Press. ISBN 1-932360-91-3.