Helmling: Adorno Public and Private
Steven Helmling
University of Delware
http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/17.3helmling.html
Review of:
Adorno, T.W. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
---. Letters to His Parents: 1939-1951. Ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
---, and Thomas Mann. Correspondence 1943-1955. Ed. Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
Gerhardt, Christina, ed. "Adorno and Ethics." Special issue of New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006).
Clip:
"When students excited by "The Culture Industry" or some other Adorno reading ask how to get a larger grip on Adorno overall, I finally have a good answer:History and Freedom, Adorno's previously unpublished 1964-1965 lectures at Frankfurt. There are now several of these collections: in the 1960s, tape recorders were usually running when Adorno was speaking; and these lectures, addressed (from notes but without script) to undergraduates, are far more accessible than the self-consciously "difficult" writings addressed to fellow-adepts. Buzz on these lectures always mentions that they were given while Adorno was composing Negative Dialectics; History and Freedom is among the collections that can be read as a collateral draft of parts of that "late" work. Actually History and Freedom reprises Adorno's whole career: the lectures continue the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment (the opening lecture is called "Progress or Regression?"); along the way, two lectures elaborate the crucial early essay, "The Idea of Natural History," and no fewer than four extend the hints in "The Actuality of Philosophy" on "the transition from philosophy to interpretation." All of Adorno's major career investments are here except "the aesthetic": there are, indeed, many asides on art especially in the lectures on interpretation, but "the aesthetic" connects with the main theme mostly via Hegel's "end of art.""
Charlie Wilson's Warlords
Charlie Wilson's Warlords
by Ivan Eland
http://antiwar.com/eland/
It is ironic that during the Cold War, liberals like Charlie Wilson and neoconservatives like Ronald Reagan agreed on pursuing this costly and interventionist containment strategy. The venues in which they preferred to challenge the Soviets may have differed – the neoconservatives preferred the futile effort to support the Contras in Nicaragua, while the liberals preferred backing the mujahedeen in Afghanistan – but they had the same foreign policy. The interventionist consensus continued after the Cold War and ultimately led to the blowback of 9/11. It shouldn't be any surprise that liberals and neoconservatives alike have opted for an interventionist foreign policy, since both support government activism at home (again, with differing preferences as to the areas of mischief). But unfortunately, 9/11 demonstrated that the cost of overseas meddling by Charlie Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and their liberal and neoconservative brethren in the state apparatus might be even higher than the cost which accrues from government intervention domestically.