In a career spanning nearly half a century, the US journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has sought to expose economic inequality and to critique the utopian and delusional character of the arguments used to justify it. In Nickel and Dimed (2001) she revealed how the lives of unskilled workers give the lie to ‘trickledown’ economics, while in... Continue Reading →
The political earthquake shaking New Zealand
Having arrived in Christchurch in the small hours of the morning, I have to wait till my alarm call comes through at 8am for my first proper view of it. It’s a disconcerting experience. It is now four years since the Canterbury earthquake caused widespread damage to ‘the Garden City’ and three and a half... Continue Reading →
A review of Anne Manne’s Life of I
In the wake of the 2011 Norway massacre, in which Anders Breivik killed 77 people (69 of them on the island of Utøya), a small and unseemly argument broke out amongst the commentariat about whether or not the killer’s actions constituted terrorism. For commentators of a conservative persuasion, the killing spree was the act of... Continue Reading →
Bad Faith: on Ronald Dworkin’s Religion without God
For all that he tried to extend the scope of human sympathy in his influential oeuvre, Professor Ronald Dworkin, who died last year at the age of 81, was a divisive figure. To his critics, the US philosopher and scholar of constitutional law was the theorist-in-chief of ‘rights culture’ and the poster boy for an... Continue Reading →
On Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals
The title of Ceridwen Dovey’s new book is snipped from an essay by Boria Sax: ‘What does it mean to be human? Perhaps only the animals can know.’ Sax is an author and academic with a particular interest in the branch of ethology known as anthrozoology, the aim of which is to study the relationship... Continue Reading →
The Flame of Power
For Plato, the ideal city-state was one in which ‘philosopher-kings’ would take charge; ‘Unless philosophers bear kingly rule in cities,’ he has Socrates say in The Republic, ‘there will be no respite from evil.’ In reality, however, the history of intellectuals in power has not been a happy one; indeed, it seems that theoretical acumen... Continue Reading →
On Geoffrey Robertson and Michael Kirby
‘Although an expatriate, I am not an ex-patriot’, writes the human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson in his introduction to Dreaming Too Loud, a collection of essays spanning thirty years and touching on subjects as diverse as drones, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Julian Assange. It’s a point on which he insists more than once, perhaps because,... Continue Reading →
A dangerous cynicism
It is now almost exactly a quarter of a century since history – or rather History – ended. The year was 1989. Amidst the collapsing scenery of the Soviet Union and its European satellites, a political scientist called Francis Fukuyama stepped forward to declare that liberal democracy was now the only game in town. His... Continue Reading →
On David Whish-Wilson’s Perth
The object of travel, wrote G. K. Chesterton, ‘is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land’. David Whish-Wilson returned to his own country, Australia, at the age of twenty-nine, having spent a decade ‘bumming around’ in Europe, Asia and Africa.... Continue Reading →
Would You Kill the Fat Man?
Consider the following scenario. Terrorists have hijacked three passenger aeroplanes, two of which have just been flown into skyscrapers in the middle of a busy city. On its first run, the third plane missed its target, but it is now lining up for another attempt. In the meantime, you – the head of the Air... Continue Reading →