My deep apologies for the textual overlapping which has become such an annoying feature of these posts. I simply don't know how to deal with this problem - which reflects so badly on blogger.com!
Monday, January 12, 2026
Democratic Backsliding
Designing Resistance - democratic institutions and the threat of backsliding (IDEA 2023)The following (non-exhaustive) list outlines 12 of the most frequently seen trends in backsliding:
1. Draining, packing and instrumentalizing the judiciary. This process begins by diluting the power of the judiciary—for example, by restricting its jurisdiction or lowering judicial retirement ages to purge sitting judges from the bench. The court is then packed, either by filling newly vacant seats or by adding or expanding tribunals in order to allow the current majority to confirm several judges at once. Once reconstituted, power is reinfused into the judiciary, who can act to enable and legitimize the backsliding regime’s policies as well as to attack the opposition. See: Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Hungary, Israel, Nicaragua, Maldives, Poland, Türkiye, United States of America, Venezuela.
2. Tilting the electoral playing field. This involves making changes to the electoral system to heavily favour the incumbent. This can include changing electoral districts and apportionment (gerrymandering), curating the electorate through selective enfranchisement/disenfranchisement and changing the way that surplus votes and seats are distributed between winners and losers. It might also include finding ways to disqualify opposition members from standing for election or reducing transparency or independence in election management and oversight. See: Albania, Benin, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Georgia, Hungary, India, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Poland, Serbia, Türkiye, Ukraine, USA, Venezuela, Zambia.
3. Weakening the power of the existing opposition. Limiting the ability of the existing opposition to check the government complements the tactic of working to keep the opposition from gaining power. It has been achieved by using disciplinary sanctions against opposition members to remove them from parliament and amending parliamentary procedures to reduce the floor time or bargaining power of the minority. See: Ecuador, Hungary, India, Türkiye, Ukraine, USA (Tennessee), Venezuela, Zambia.
4.Creating a democratic shell. This tactic involves incorporating measures into the constitution or legal system which are ostensibly democratizing or liberalizing but do not necessarily have that effect in practice. This might occur when design choices are imported from other democratic systems but are divorced from other elements central to their functioning or lack the enforcement mechanisms that give them teeth. This strategy allows the backslider to point to design elements borrowed from strong democratic countries and insist that criticism is unfounded or even hypocritical. See: Hungary, North Macedonia, Türkiye.
5. Shifting competencies/parallel institutions. This strategy entails shifting powers from a non-captured institution to a captured one. This can be useful when the existing institution has effective safeguards for independence. For example, a backslider could set up a new elections oversight committee, which is then given some powers previously held by an independent election management board. While this may, at first glance, appear simply to give greater attention to an important issue, it ensures that this attention is exercised by those chosen by the administration. See: Hungary, Israel, Poland, Venezuela. 5. 5.
6. Political capture: realigning chains of command and accountability. This involveschanging appointment procedures or bringing an office under the command of a different (political) office, thus infusing civil service offices with a political pressure that is difficult to detect from the outside. For example, independent prosecutors may be brought under the command of the Minister of Justice, having originally been accountable to an independent judicial oversight board chosen by judges and lawyers. See: Hungary, Israel, Poland.
7. Selective prosecution and enforcement. Selectivity is one
of the most common and liberally used of the backsliding methods. On the
prosecution side, it may include prosecuting political opponents for low-level
non-political crimes—such as building code violations or tax infractions—whichare not generally strictly enforced. On the rights side, it might include having
laws on the books that ostensibly protect minorities but failing to enforce them
when certain unfavoured minorities are affected. See: India, Türkiye, Ukraine,
USA, Zambia.
8. Evasion of term limits. Eliminating term limits is usually justified by one
of two arguments. One is that they obstruct the ability of the people to choose their own leader. The other is that they impede the ability of
the backslider—portrayed as the only true representative and defender of the
interests of ‘the people’—to vindicate those interests. Term limits may be
evaded in a number of ways beyond mere elimination. The toolkit includes
examples such as enacting term limits that do not apply retroactively
(El Salvador); rotating out of office and then back in (Russia); and delaying
elections on purportedly emergency grounds (Ethiopia). See: Armenia, Bolivia,
Burkina Faso, Burundi, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Venezuela. 9.
Expanding executive power. Most tools in the toolkit involve eroding the
checks on the exercise of executive power. The converse of these strategies
is the direct expansion of that power. Expanding executive power is, in some
sense, the most direct form of backsliding because backsliding largely serves
the main end goal of aggrandizing power personally to the backslider.
While more efficient and effective, directly expanding power is more transparent
and thus politically costly than the subtler art of shaving down checks.
Executive powers that have been expanded include control over appointments
(Ukraine), control over finances (Hungary) or even the power to decree laws on
certain topics, like banking or use of national resources (Venezuela).
See: Armenia, Hungary, Türkiye, Ukraine, USA, Venezuela. 10. Temporal entrenchment (‘harpooning’). This refers to a strategy
whereby backsliders make major changes while they enjoy a
supermajority and then move to make it as difficult as possible
for those changes to be undone. This involves (a) requiring a
future supermajority to undo the changes and (b) relying on other
measures, such as tilting the electoral playing field, to make it
difficult for the opposition to acquire such a supermajority.
We refer to this strategy as ‘harpooning’ because the backslider
penetrates the halls of power, makes changes and then makes these
difficult to undo—much in the way that a harpoon opens and cannot
be pulled back out. See: Hungary.
11. Shrinking the civic space. This tactic includes attacks on the media,
civil society organizations and the civil liberties of the electorate. These should
normally act as checks on government by demanding government transparency
and promoting government accountability, facilitating the organization of opposition
and protest, and, of course, by exercising the franchise. However, the backslider
can significantly impair the ability of these non-government ‘institutions’ to act as a
check by buying up, shutting down or regulating the media; placing onerous
requirements on unfriendly civil society organizations; and using libel laws or states
of emergency to restrict freedoms of expression and association among the electorate.
See: Hungary, Poland, Türkiye, Zambia.
12. Non-institutional strategies. While this Report canvasses
institutional tactics by which backsliding is achieved, it is still imperative for the
constitution-builder to consider non-institutional strategies, such as using populist
rhetoric or supporting discriminatory policies. Account should be given to how
institutional design choices can help (a) to address a backslider’s ability to use such
non-institutional tactics to their advantage and (b) to prevent the conditions that
give rise to backsliding in the first place. Regulation of political parties, for example,
may help prevent backsliding candidates from entering office at all.
Wednesday, January 7, 2026
FINAL POST ON LEFTISM
There have, apparently, been posts about 30 books on the leftist theme in my recent writing – of which several are my favourites eg
Corbyn Leo Panitch and Colin Hay (2020) Each of the three great economic crises of the last century – the 1930s, the 1970s and the decade after 2008 – precipitated a crisis in the Labour Party.
Each time, the crisis posed fundamental questions of ideology, organisation and unity, and ended up by propelling into the leadership a radical socialist MP from the party’s left wing. In each instance this produced a sharp reaction aimed at blocking whatever potential the crisis had for taking the party in a new democratic-socialist direction. And in each case Britain’s relationship with Europe played an important role.
the fall of Corbyn Michael Chessum (2022).Alternative Societies for a Pluralist Socialism Luke Martell (2023)
Today I have 3 Beyond Social Democracy – the transformation of the left in
emerging knowledge societies ed S Hausermann and H Kitschelt (2024)
The slow and intermittent electoral erosion of Social Democracy in the late twentieth century has accelerated over the past two decades across much of Europe. Almost none of the European social democratic parties has managed to defy the maelstrom of electoral decline. By the 2020s, most center-left parties carrying the social democratic, socialist, or labor label have become shadows of their former selves in terms of aggregate vote shares, members, activists, legislators, and government cabinet members. Scholars have offered many explanations for Social Democracy’s misfortunes.
No single hypothesis may be sufficient to account for this development exhaustively. Some of the explanations have a nostalgic flavor, arguing that social democratic parties have changed “too much” over the past decades, reneging on their established policy promises and thereby abandoning the needs of an erstwhile loyal electoral constituency. Other explanations posit that social democratic parties have changed “not enough,” failing to adapt to transformed voter potentials and to develop creative responses to novel societal and political-economic challenges that require Social Democrats to reimagine ways to advance social equality and universalism in society.
The first perspective – Social Democracy having changed “too much” – draws empirical support from some undeniable facts, such as the declining propensity to support Social Democracy among the parties’ traditional core constituencies, particularly blue-collar workers. However, the various empirical analyses in the chapters of this volume suggest that the overwhelming balance of evidence points toward Social Democrats not having adapted enough to changing substantive policy challenges, changing programmatic dynamics, and changing electoral landscapes.
Social democratic parties encounter massive difficulties in reimagining their programmatic electoral appeal to stem electoral decline. These difficulties, however, are not simply the consequence of strategic mistakes or myopia. Rather, both structural political-economic change and strategic party calculations make it virtually impossible to capture as encompassing an electoral constituency as many social democratic parties did in the period of post–World War II (WWII) economic prosperity growth in the West. Society has been profoundly transformed both socially and economically; it has become pluralized and more fragmented, and so have programmatic electoral competition and party systems.
In this more scattered and fragmented political space, ripe with political divides over programmatic positions and priorities, social democratic parties can nowhere extricate themselves from their current electoral predicaments. However, their fortunes vary with how they have coped over time with these new competitive situations. Most importantly, they are no longer the only and sometimes not even the largest parties in a “left field” of competitors – all of which embrace fundamental “social democratic values” but articulate them through different policies and by appealing to constituencies absent in the traditional social democratic electoral coalition.
Andrew Murray is a trade union activist with a strange aristocratic pedigree and author of The Fall and Rise of the British Left (2019)
While much of this book focuses on the fortunes of the Labour Party over the last fifty years, the Party itself is not necessarily coterminous with the British left. The latter includes all those who politically advocate for a shift to a socialist system of society, a grouping that overlaps considerably with the labour movement. In contrast, the Labour Party has always included an element (usually dominant) not interested in socialism at all, while the left has embraced movements, campaigns, initiatives and parties standing outside the Party.
Today, the left and the Labour Party are more closely entwined than at any point in history. This has been the outcome of the left’s own struggles against a rising and then declining neoliberalism since the 1970s. It is represented by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, although it did not start there and won’t end there either. As a result, this is not another book about the rise of Corbyn. It is about a movement and the ideas underpinning it, which cannot be reduced to any one individual and will outlast any particular leadership and any foreseeable electoral outcomes.Chapters 1 through to 8 are more or less chronological, telling the fall–rise and rise–fall stories together, perhaps informing younger activists how we got here and what debates there were along the way. The two concluding chapters break with the chronology. In essence they seek to answer the question posed by a colleague who read an early draft of this book – ‘How do we win?’ – by which she meant how do we get from here to socialism.
None of the scenarios which gripped the left I grew up with in the twentieth century appear fully plausible any more, although neither 1917 nor 1945 seemed so in prior contemplation. In that spirit, we cross the river a stone at a time. The other bank is there, even if only dimly perceived, the present side no longer habitable. So what’s next? In many countries across Europe and North America, only two choices present themselves – a reconstituted centrism flogging the dead horse of the old dispensation, or a nationalist authoritarianism trading on populist sloganizing. These two live in a symbiotic relationship, sharing far more than either likes to admit. When push comes to shove, liberalism defends property and market rights first of all. If the liberals wanted to stop the rise of the authoritarians, one contribution to that cause might have been the jailing of a few bankers.
Instead, they were rewarded with a super-fast return to business – and bonuses – as usual. The parties and politicians of the left, like Hollande and Obama, who campaigned offering a different approach but ended up abandoning many of their pledges and conforming to the Wall Street–City–Brussels consensus instead, did more than anyone to inculcate a cynicism towards democratic politics and open the door to the nastiest elements of the right wing. The leaders of the authoritarian nationalists’ pseudo-alternative, for their part, treasure most of the system they rail against. Theirs is a rebellion against powerlessness organized by the powerful. Authoritarian populism is neoliberalism’s ugly enabler, not its principled opponent – a ‘populism’ which seeks to entrench gross inequality, strengthen every institution of class power, and preserve the basic institutions of economic liberalism while indulging freely in racism and xenophobia. The main purpose of the lurid Donald Trump is to make the rich still richer (himself definitely included). Indeed, the shift to authoritarianism represented by Trump, Erdoğan, Orbán, Modi and Bolsonaro mostly reflects the difficulty in extending neoliberalism by democratic means at a time of its rampant
unpopularity. This is not how history ends. Conjuring the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin warn that ‘the persistence of neoliberalism alongside hyper-nationalism through the crisis increasingly poses the question of “socialism vs barbarism redux”’.2 Barbarism redux is evidently on the menu, synthesizing elite neoliberalism with authoritarian identity politics – backing the bankers while banning the burka. Behind Boris Johnson, still worse may lurk.
The final book is Our Bloc – how we win James Schneider (2022). The Guardian reviewed the book and had this to say - James Schneider was a co-founder of Momentum, the political movement formed off the
back of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, and was later the party’s head of strategic communications. In his new book, he takes a different approach. Opening boldly and promisingly, his first
words are “defeatism plagues the British left”, and his introduction sketches his ambition: “To keep the possibilities open and turn winning from a distant hope into a reality, we must use the coming years to build power, weaken our opponents, and prepare ourselves for the next surge.” At just over 100 pages it is more of a pamphlet and the footnotes are
vital, linking to books, blogs and articles, and pointing the reader towards a wide range of debates. The intellectual parenthood of the book is obvious – the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, and in particular her For a Left Populism, Antonio Gramsci’s Modern
Prince in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, and the work of Stuart Hall.
Such influences set severe standards, though, and Schneider fails to meet them. The intellectual energy that powered the rise of Corbyn was real, and it puts Labour party
moderates to shame that the centrist intellectual touchstone Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism is nearly 70 years old. Yes, the Labour manifesto was soundly rejected by voters in 2019, but it was enthusiastically endorsed by the same electorate in 2017. The UK left has to internalise the fact that both general elections were equally consequential: currently moderates focus on the landslide in 2019, and the left celebrate successfully destroying a Tory majority in 2017. Both sides are right – and both sides need each other.
Friday, January 2, 2026
WHAT’S BECOME OF THE LEFT?
Every year at this time, I publish the annual collection of last year’s posts. This year, I’m using the title What’s Become of the Left? The 2025 posts because of the large number of posts about leftish books I’ve been looking at. It’s interesting to look at previous titles of these collections -
Ways of Seeing – the 2024 posts (236pp)Whistling in the Wind – the 2023 posts (305pp) Have I really become so long-winded?
This too will Pass – the 2022 posts - a title which perhaps fell into the trap of fatalism (191pp)
Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts - a title from the famous quote from Keynes when he talked of the unnoticed influence of books on our minds (224pp)
Peripheral Vision – the 2020 posts. This celebrates the blog’s notion of creativity (244pp)
To Whom it may Concern – the 2019 posts. Normally written in support of someone’s application (282pp)
The Search for the Holy Grail – the 2018 posts Something I’ve been guilty of (169pp)
Common Endeavour – the 2017 posts An important concept for me (183pp)
The Slaves’ Chorus – the 2016 posts (120pp) I remember listening to an emotional rendering of this chorus in a Brno theatre in 1990. I hadn’t realised that the full title of this song is actually the Hebrew Slaves’ Chorus
In Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s year (2015) An allusion to the Brecht poem of that title (247pp)
Sunday, December 28, 2025
HOPE
Maude Barlow is a Canadian activist and writer who has produced numerous books of which this is the most recent Still Hopeful – lessons from a lifetime of activism ; Maude Barlow (2022)
The Principle of Hope, published in the 1950s, by the great German philosopher Ernst Bloch saw all of human history as the story of hope for a better future. Deeply marked by the two world wars and the class struggles and divisions within his own country, Bloch distinguished between what he called “fraudulent” or “false” hope and “genuine” hope, which, to be effective, needs to be stoked by “informed discontent.” False hope, he warned, is often used by governments to tamp down dissent among the marginalized and can find us staring at a blank wall, blind to “the door that may be close.”
American Zen Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax clarifies how she sees the difference between optimism and hope.
Optimism, she says, can be dangerous as it doesn’t require engagement. Things will be better on their own, says the optimist, and if they aren’t, one can become a pessimist, taking refuge in the belief that there is nothing to be done. Optimists and pessimists actually have something in common, says Halifax — they are excused from engagement. She calls instead for “wise” hope, and wise hope most surely requires engagement.
The book she talks about is The Principle of Hope Ernst Bloch (1986)
Bloch's theory of cultural criticism is rooted in his anthropological and philosophical perspectives, which are delineated in the first two parts of The Principle of Hope. Part three contains explorations of "Wishful Images in the Mirror," in which Bloch decodes traces of hope permeating everyday life and culture. No philosopher since Hegel has explored in such detail and with such penetration the cultural tradition, which for Bloch contains untapped emancipatory potential. Yet Bloch concentrates not only on the great works of the cultural heritage, but on familiar and ordinary aspects of everyday experience, within which Bloch finds utopian potential. Fashion, grooming, new clothes, and how we make ourselves appear to others exhibit the utopian potential of transforming us into something better.
Perceiving the utopian potential of advertising, Bloch recognizes that it invests magical properties into commodities, which will produce allegedly magical results for the customer. "Shop-windows and advertising are in their capitalist form exclusively lime-twigs for the attracted dream birds". To be sure, the promises of advertising and consumer culture are often false promises and often produce false needs, but their power and ubiquity shows the depth of the needs that capitalism exploits and the wishes for another life that permeate capitalist societies.
Moreover, many people wear masks, often derived from magazines or mass cultural images, to transform themselves, to attempt to invent a more satisfying life. Thus, do youths join subcultures, even fascist ones like the Ku Klux Klan. Criminals and crime provide powerful attractions to oppressed youth, promising transcendence of their everyday misery. Similar motivations lead individuals to join the Klan and other racist groups, to try to get a new and more satisfying identity through immersion in violent subcultures. Magazines, best-selling novels, and film and television also offer advice and models for self-transformation and how to achieve romance, success, and wealth.
Active Hope – how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (2012)
In any great adventure, there are always obstacles in the way. The first hurdle is just to be aware that we, as a civilization and as a species, are facing a crisis point. When we look at mainstream society, and the priorities expressed or goals pursued, it is hard to see much evidence of this awareness. In the first chapter we try to make sense of the huge gap between the scale of the emergency and the size of the response by describing how our perceptions are shaped by the story we identify with. We describe three stories, or versions of reality, each acting as a lens through which we see and understand what’s going on.
In the first of these, Business as Usual, the defining assumption is that there is little need to change the way we live. Economic growth is regarded as essential for prosperity, and the central plot is about getting ahead.
The second story, the Great Unraveling, draws attention to the disasters that Business as Usual is taking us toward, as well as those it has already brought about. It is an account, backed by evidence, of the collapse of ecological and social systems, the disturbance of climate, the depletion of resources, and the mass extinction of species.
The third story is held and embodied by those who know the first story is leading us to catastrophe and who refuse to let the second story have the last word. Involving the emergence of new and creative human responses, it is about the epochal transition from an industrial society committed to economic growth to a life-sustaining society committed to the healing and recovery of our world. We call this story the Great Turning. The central plot is finding and offering our gift of Active Hope.
There is no point in arguing about which of these stories is “right.” All three are happening. The question is which one we want to put our energy behind. The first chapter is about looking at where we are and choosing the story we want our lives to express. The rest of the book focuses on how we strengthen our capacity to contribute to the Great Turning in the best way we can. Each chapter is summarised here (in 159 pages!)
Friday, December 26, 2025
AN UPDATE ON JOURNALS WORTH READING
Almost ten years ago. I posted about intellectual journals worth reading. As a Xmas bonus I thought it useful to repost it (with a few titles deleted since they no longer operate). I started with a question about which (English language) journals would pass a test which included such criteria as –
- Depth of treatment
- Breadth of coverage (not just political)
- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)
- clarity of writing
- skeptical in tone
My own regular favourite reading includes The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews, London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books – and the occasional glance at the New Yorker; New Statesman; and Spiked. This choice betrays a certain “patrician” position – not too “tribal”…….although my initial google search limited itself to such epithets as “left”, “progressive”, “green”;; “radical” and “humanist”.
It threw up a couple of lists – one with “progressive” titles, the other with “secular”. From these, I have extracted the other titles which might lay some claims to satisfying the stringent criteria set above…..
Current Affairs is a fairly new American radical journal which looks to be very well-written eg this take-down of The Economist mag
Dissent; a US leftist stalwart
Jacobin; a leftist E-mag which I have grown to appreciate – one of the few to which I subscribe
Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian. It makes available translated articles with superb etchings..
Literary
Hub;
a literary site with original selections and frequent posts. Not
one I now follow
Los
Angeles Review of Books;
relatively
new journal whose
writing occasionally grates
Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis
Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive
N+1; one of the new and smoother leftist mags
New Humanist; an important strand of UK thought
New Left Review; THE great UK leftist journal - running on a quarterly basis since 1960. Also one to which I subscribe
New Republic; solid US monthly
Prospect (UK); rather too smooth UK monthly
The American Prospect (US); ditto US
Public
Books –
an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual
debate
Quillette; a
"free-thinking"
contrarian and libertarian journal
Resurgence and Ecologist; ditto UK Greens
Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism
Slate; more right wing
Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste
The
Atlantic;
one of my favourite US mags
The
Conversation;
a rare venture which uses academics as journalists
The Marginalian; an interesting cultural journal which I no longer follow – being a bit too predictable
The Nation; America's oldest weekly, for the "progressive" community
The
New Yorker;
impressive US writing which
I’ve been tempted to subscribe to
Washington
Independent Review;
a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so
many book review columns
World Socialist Website; good on critical global journalism
Academic
journals
I would not normally deign academic journals with a second glance since theirs is an incestuous breed – with arcane language and specialized focus which breaches at least two of the above five tests. But Political Quarterly stands apart with the superbly written (social democratic) analyses which have been briefing us for almost a century. Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics and Governance run it close with more global coverage.
Self-styled
“Radical“ journals
seem,
curiously, to be gaining strength at precisely the moment the left is
collapsing everywhere.
Beyond the small grove of explicitly revolutionary titles lies a vast forest of critical publications. From “Action Research” to “Anarchist Studies”, from “Race and Class” to “Review of Radical Political Economics”, an impressive array of dissident ventures appears to be thriving. As Western capitalism jabs repeatedly at the auto-destruct button, it may seem only logical that rebel voices are getting louder. But logic has nothing to do it with it. Out in the real world, the Left is moribund. Socialism has become a heritage item. Public institutions, including UK universities, are ever more marketised. Alternatives seem in short supply.
So, far from being obvious, the success of radical journals is a bit of a puzzle. And they have proved they have staying power. The past few years have seen a clutch of titles entering late middle age, including those in the Marxist tradition, such as “New Left Review” (founded 1960), “Critique” (1973) and “Capital and Class” (1977), as well as more broadly critical ventures, such as “Transition” (1961) and “Critical Inquiry” (1974). Numerous other titles have emerged in the intervening years. And they are still coming.
Recent titles include “Power and Education”, “Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies” and “Human Geography: A New Radical Journal”. Of course, some disciplines provide more fertile soil for such ventures than others. In cultural studies, politics, geography and sociology, radicalism has entered the mainstream. But even the more stony ground of economics nurtures a wide assortment of dissident titles.
A concept with unrealized potential, I feel, is that of the “global roundup” ” with selections of representative writing from around the globe. Courrier international is a good, physical, Francophone example – the others being “virtual” or E-journals eg Arts and Letters Daily a good literary, anglo-saxon exemplar; The Intercept a political one; with Eurozine taking the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 80 plus cultural journals
I learn one main thing from this review - how tribal most journals are. Most seem to cater for a niche political market. Only N+1 (and the New Yorker) makes an effort to cover the world of ideas from a broader standpoint...The lead articles which Eurozine gives us from different parts of Europe makes it an interesting read; and Political Quarterly is a model for clear writing - even if it is a bit too British in its scope. But I give away both my age and agnostic tendencies when I say that my favourite journal remains "Encounter" which was shockingly revealed in the late 80s to have been partially funded by the CIA and which therefore shut up shop in 1990....
The entire set of 1953-1990 issues are archived here – and the range and quality of the authors given space can be admired. European notebooks – new societies and old politics 1954-1985; is a book devoted to one of its most regular writers, the Swiss Francois Bondy (2005)
A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.
European Notebooks contains most of the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.
Bondy's essays themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime metier, the cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de lettres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan.
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