December 28, 2005
Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists
While in Miami early this month, I read Johann Hari’s NYTBR review of Paul Berman’s “remarkable book” Power and the Idealists (Soft Skull Press). Berman, an intellectual historian whose chief area of study is the “New Left,” would use Joschka Fischer’s transformation from ’68-era protester to Green Party leader and, eventually, German Foreign Minister: “If anyone can put [the 2001 revelation of Fischer’s role in a 1973 police beating] into its historical context, it's Berman. He is not only an alumnus of the rebellion; he is the keeper of its yearbook and its funeral director. In this free-standing sequel to his superb ‘Tale of Two Utopias,’ he revisits the European graduating class of Rebellion High.”
I’m extremely interested in the “afterlives” (to use Kristin Ross’s phrase) of 1968’s social upheavals, and so I asked for (and received) the book for Christmas. Unfortunately Hari’s review was not of Berman’s book, but rather of its first chapter, which is a slightly modified version of a September 3, 2001, article for The New Republic called “The Passion of Joschka Fischer.” Note the publication date: The article was written prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York, and therefore stops more or less with Fischer’s decision to support NATO’s Kosovo intervention in the late ‘90s. It is a superb history of the thirty-year slide from radicalism to interventionist liberalism, deftly synthesizing the ideologies of innumerable left-wing factions into a very readable narrative.
But Berman is also the author of Terror and Liberalism, a 2003 book purporting to explain the meaning of September 11. It was widely read and discussed at the time; I remember it well from its months-long perch on Strand Books’s “Bestsellers” table, although I never picked up a copy. To quote Stephen Holmes, who discussed Terror and Liberalism in a review of the newer book in The Nation:
Modeling himself roughly on Hannah Arendt, who exposed the deep but underappreciated similarity between German Nazism and Soviet Communism, Berman drew attention to what he considered the underlying identity of state tyranny and nonstate terrorism. Or, rather, he set out to justify two farfetched analogies, both essential to defending the Bush Administration's response to 9/11. He first tried to convince us that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a tribal war over scarce land and water, is part of the wider spiritual war between liberalism and apocalyptic irrationalism, not worth distinguishing too sharply from the conflict between America and Al Qaeda. And then he attempted to show that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden represented two "branches" of an essentially homogeneous Muslim extremism. By hammering away at this second parallel, he echoed Bush's contention that the invasion of Iraq was both a fitting reply to 9/11 and a shrewd way to protect America from 9/11-style attacks.
Unfortunately for me, the four chapters that round out Power and the Idealists are more of a sequel to this “liberal hawk” territory than Tale of Two Utopias, offsetting the description of Fischer with interwoven thumbnail biographies of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Bernard Kouchner (a founder of Doctors Without Borders), Azar Nafisi (of Reading Lolita in Tehran fame), and others . . . a generational portrait, to use Berman’s phrase. These figures are then used to further Berman's points about the current Iraq war, the run up to which he discusses at some length.
Even given my limited knowledge of the subject matter, I could easily tell that Berman is reaching beyond his grasp in presenting this material. And here his style, conversational in the first chapter, becomes a kind of Liberal Political Theory for Dummies, full of unnecessary repetitions, rhetorical questions, and grating essentialisms. (On Nafisi’s book: “Most of her scenes are on an intimate scale—Persian miniatures, so to speak, sketched in hues that are oddly dark. The scenes may seem a little exotic at times, because Iran seems exotic to us non-Iranians.”)
Near the end of his review, Hari writes: “In Berman's reading the young Fischer, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the revolutionary cells were merely the rancid afterbirth of the street protests. The baby itself, he writes persuasively, grew into a vibrant European antitotalitarian tradition.” Would that it were so. If Berman had elaborated upon the thesis of his article first published four years ago, rather than trying to yoke it to the his very successful Terror and Liberalism, Power and the Idealists would make for a great read. As it stands, Hari’s review is misleading and Berman’s book disappoints.