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335 Afterword The New York Intellectuals were one institution emblematic of what we can call the modern public intellectual. Not quite global, their diasporic, urban status certainly made them cosmopolitan and international in outlook. As Percival Goodman put it, “the Jew is not somebody from Judea, not anymore. Two thousand years have made the Jew an international being. That’s what he must realize.”1 The New York Intellectuals may have realized that, but only in a kind of provisional way; seeing a stable historical identity as an obstacle, they chose a new, universal one. Since that time, the word diaspora has become commonplace, and numerous peoples have come to recognize themselves as international, or at least hyphenated, beings. Feeling freer to choose Jewish and American identities, at least some Jewish intellectuals have become, arguably, less global in outlook. The figure of the public intellectual—never as unitary as some posited—has become more diffuse, scattered among numerous groups and institutions. And the public intellectual mission has also become more complex and decentered, lacking a central ideology. A simple rubric or opposition, such as socialism or capitalism, will no longer do. With history and complexity discrediting a pure form of socialism, is there a unifying philosophy for today’s public intellectuals? Is such a philosophy even desirable? I would suggest that extreme relativism leaves little for the public intellectual because one system of governance then becomes as good as any other. And the fact is that the global community has been evolving toward a set of widely accepted beliefs that merges liberal democracy with an extended role for human rights. Although still evolving and contested, these core rights include the rule of law; the right to an education; freedom of speech; suffrage; the right to a fair trial; freedom from torture; private ownership; transparency; and access to food, shelter, and health care. Going deeper than the liberal democracy of Francis Fukuyama, these derive from, and extend, classic liberalism, for which the United States was at one time, and despite its many shortcomings, the global exemplar. In this new world, the role of the United States has turned extremely sour. Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of history may not be dead, but it is in critical condition. Perhaps the majority of the world’s people do yearn to breathe free, yet the U.S. is no longer the primary role model. It is proving simply impossible to impose our will to force others to be free; the move toward liberal democracy Morris_FINAL.indb 335 Morris_FINAL.indb 335 9/25/2008 8:13:59 AM 9/25/2008 8:13:59 AM 336 AFTERWORD needs to be more, well, democratic, with a deeper conception of rights. Perhaps the U.S. model will be replaced by the European one, with its international outlook , loose confederation of states, and guarantees of basic security to its people. Perhaps some other country, such as India, will step into the breach. Perhaps, frighteningly, the Chinese model, with its fusion of capitalism and authoritarianism , will spread farther. It seems likely, however, that we will simply move to a decentered world of great powers and smaller powers all jostling for power, in some ways a replay of nineteenth-century international politics. What has made this transition period so disjointed and uncertain? Being the sole superpower appears to have damaged the United States, which has felt zero competition, no reason to become better. The old truism that empires perish from within seems apt here, at least so far as one considers the U.S. an empire. Complaining about the adversary culture of academia, in 1979 Irving Kristol asked, “has there ever been, in all of recorded history, a civilization whose culture was at odds with the values and ideals of that civilization itself?”2 I would suggest that we have fallen victim to the opposite phenomenon, that earlier periods of self-reflectivity and allowance for dissent made our society stronger, made it flexible, able to bend without breaking. Contrarily, as victors in the cold war, we have encouraged a rigid version of triumphal capitalism for much of the planet. Indeed, because the actors were far from equal, the markets were not as free as our rhetoric pretended. An extreme version of this occurred when Halliburton received huge no-bid contracts to reconstruct Iraq following the war. This is capitalism without competition, capitalism that denies a people the right to help rebuild their own societies, capitalism divorced from the ideals...

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