Power and the Idealists by Paul Berman

by Paul Berman

The author of the best-selling Terror and Liberalism on the rise to power of the generation of 1968.

The student uprisings of 1968 erupted not only in America but also across Europe, expressing a distinct generational attitude about politics, the corrupt nature of democratic capitalism, and the evil of military interventions. Yet, thirty-five years later, many in that radical generation had come into conventional positions of power: among them Bill Clinton (who reportedly stayed up all night reading this book) and Joschka Fischer, foreign minister of Germany. During a 1970s street protest, Fischer was photographed beating a cop to the ground; during the 1990s, he was supporting Clinton in a NATO-led military intervention in the Balkans.

Here Paul Berman, "one of America's best exponents of recent intellectual history" (The Economist), masterfully traces the intellectual and moral evolution of an impassioned generation—and gives an acute analysis of what it means to go to war in the name of democracy and human rights.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Political Science, Germany

Hardcover

First published June 1, 2005

About the author

Paul Lawrence Berman is an American author and journalist who writes on politics and literature. His articles have been published in The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review and Slate, and he is the author of several books, including A Tale of Two Utopias and Terror and Liberalism.

Berman received his undergraduate education from Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1971 with a BA and MA in American history. He has reported on Nicaragua's civil wars, Mexico's elections, and the Czech Republic's Velvet Revolution. Currently he is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, a professor of journalism and distinguished writer in residence at New York University, and a member of the editorial board of Dissent. Berman's influence has seen him described as a 'Philosopher King' of the liberal hawks."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Berman

"Paul Berman is a writer on politics and literature whose articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the New Republic (where he is a contributing editor), the New Yorker, Slate, the Village Voice, Dissent, and various other American, European and Latin American journals. He has reported at length from Europe and Latin America. He has written or edited eight books, including, most recently, Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath, with a new preface by Richard Holbrooke for the 2007 paperback edition; Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction, published in 2006 by the American Poets Project of the Library of America; and Terror and Liberalism, a New York Times best-seller in 2003. His writings have been translated into fifteen languages. Berman received a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Columbia University and has been awarded a MacArthur, a Guggenheim, the Bosch Berlin Prize, a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Center for Writers & Scholars, and other honors.

Reviews

[R]

By following the career of German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (1998-2005) and other prominent leftists of 1968, author Paul Berman explores how people once committed to the destruction of Western liberal society found themselves advocating its spread, even through force of arms.

Berman weaves a deeply emotional and engrossing tale through the demonstrations of 1968, cadres of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Entebbe Hijacking, Medicines Sans Frontiers, Vietnamese Boat People, the Yugoslav Wars, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. By the end, you’ll likely have a firm verdict for Joschka and the others but not before finding yourself stuck in a loop of repeatedly condemning and forgiving them.

[themacinator · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somehow I ended up reading another book by Paul Berman. I'm fairly sure I didn't put it on my list after reading the first, "The Flight of the Idealists," which I found fascinating but entirely esoteric and somewhat maddening, and I've never heard of the man in the subtitle, Joschka Fischer. I'm also fairly certain that I didn't put this book on my list because of the subject matter, because in the same way as I was hard-pressed to find the point of "Flight of the Idealists," I'm not quite sure I can nail down what exactly Paul Berman is on about in "Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath." I will consider this a note-to-self not to read another of Berman's books unless I have a Very Good Reason.

As far as I can tell, "Power and the Idealists" (whoever titles Berman's works is a genius and should be employed by any publisher who aims to succeed, by the way), is a narrative of Berman's belief of what he thinks got us to the second Iraq war, at least from a European standpoint. He traces the movements and beliefs of a few influential "68ers" like the eponymous Fischer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Bernard Kouchner, various protesters cum politicians/intellectuals, and how their post-WWII rebellions shaped their political views. Turns out that a lot of modern leaders in Europe had histories either directly or tangentially involved with that time of upheaval, and, according to Berman, that these 68ers, by aiming to distinguish themselves from the Nazis and totalitarianism, often found themselves on the side of movements that were actually directly descended from the Nazis. This is totally confusing, right? Yes, in fact, it is, even more so when told with all these complicated characters that you've never heard of, and in Berman's beautiful but florid prose. Here's the first step in the story I think that Berman is trying to tell:

What was New Leftism, then? It was-it pictured itself as-Nazism's opposite and nemesis: the enemy of the real Nazism, the Nazism that had survived Nazism, the Nazism that was built into the foundations of Western life.

The problem is that along the way, while fighting Nazism, sometimes the New Left, now run by the 68ers-turned-politicians, got in bed with the wrong people or made the wrong choices in the name of fighting Nazis. Here's where Joschka Fischer comes in, although I'm going to make it much more explicit than Berman ever does. Joschka Fischer was a part of the New Left, threw sticks, hated Nazis, wasn't into intervention, and eventually became a powerful and popular member of the German government via the Green party, a pacifist group. Most Greens "still insisted on interpreting anti-Nazism to mean anti-imperialism in the left-wing style. Didn't American hegemony pose a terrible danger to Europe and to the world, perhaps the greatest danger of all?" So, when the massacres were going on in the Balkans, the Germans (sorry about this) balked, and the Greens along with everyone else were surprised when Fischer wanted to send troops. Hitler had sent troops to Bosnia: how could the New Left do the same? He chose according to Berman, "antitotalitarianism, humanitarian action, [and] NATO."

By the way, my inclusion of quotations and direct explanations is medal-worthy: like "Flight of the Intellectuals," "Power and the Idealists" includes neither bibliography, footnotes, nor index. And since I'm still trying to read from the library, I've resorted to sticky tabs where I think something might be important, which means I'm paging through 50 noted pages to find this stuff. A publisher who has a good title-writer and no indexer comes out on the negative side. Berman dillies and dallies around the main theme (I think it's the main theme) of what these New Left guys think is worth giving up their pacifist ideals for- massacres? death? nothing?- for 300 pages, and spends the last few on "the Tragedy of Iraq." This chapter is exceptionally thought provoking. Essentially, he proposes the argument that Bush botched the reasons for the war (duh), the war itself (duh), but was possibly not wrong that Saddam Hussein needed to be overthrown, and that Fischer and others would have helped Bush, had he gone about it correctly. By the time Berman gets to this point, it's hard to avoid the fact that the idea that people under totalitarian regimes should take care of business themselves, that it's Wrong for powerful countries to standby. The repulsiveness of the Nazis, and even of the modern Americans, does not make standing by while Saddam or Kim Jong Un does his thing acceptable. As Bernard Kouchner said after attending a peace march in Boston, "I found myself in the middle of a crowd of Democrats, sympathetic types, and not idiots. But when they demanded that America not intervene, they were doing exactly what Saddam wanted them to do... And then, there was this scandalous statistic, this poll- 33 percent of the French preferred Saddam's victory to Bush's!"

I never thought I would think of it that way. It sounds a lot like "if you're not with us, you're against us." But as Berman puts it, perhaps the best test of where the moral authority for military intervention lies "with the victims." (Actually, Berman doesn't put it this way, he ascribes that to Kouchner. Berman leaves a lot of his opinions to the imagination.) Kouchner was a man who had worked to get resolutions passed in the UN that established legal precedents for humanitarian intervention, (again, Berman ascribing to Kouchner,) "expression in international law... of a victim's right to be represented by someone other than his own government." This is the punchline of Berman's book: a bunch of people variously labeled as socialists, communists, anarchists, New Left, 68ers, etc, realizing that perhaps intervention and/or violence could be used for good. Berman again: "Maybe the strength of the strong was not, by definition, a crime against the weak. Maybe power was a tool that, decently employed, could do a world off good for the most oppressed of the oppressed, just as, in the past, the power of the big Western countries had all too systematically done worlds of harm. Maybe Western strength and imperialist oppression did not have to be synonymous." Maybe.

[Jonny · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good polemic that I mostly disagree with. Berman's thesis is that the generation of 68's worldview was fundamentally shaped by their experiences with Nazism. In the 60s New Leftists--especially in Western Europe--divided the world into collaborators and resistors. When they looked at the iron cage of postwar Western European life they observed a residual authoritarianism and they rebelled accordingly. Some in this milieu were attracted to the allure of revolutionaries of a Marxist-Leninist variety in the Global South. Some of these revolutions turned authoritarian (e.g., Cuba) or genocidal (e.g., the Khmer Rouge) and then they got their hands on The Gulag Archipelago. For these key 68 characters (e.g., Joschka Fischer, Kouchner) now armed with the work of the New Philosophers (e.g., Glucksman) the enemy became simply totalitarianism, and you either resist totalitarianism or you collaborate with it. This is what guides their justification of humanitarian intervention.

Although it is not entirely clear, Berman shares a great deal of history with these characters and is a prominent intellectual for the “liberal hawks” whose by-lines frequently appear in places like the New Republic. If Fisher and Cohn-Bendit are still hunting Nazi’s, then Berman is still hunting fellow -traveling Stalinists and French Maoists from the 1960s. When he turns his attention to the Middle East Berman’s heart still seems to be in Europe. Any talk about the history of colonialism is inadmissible because—in Berman’s telling--most of the Middle East has been ruled by totalitarian Islamists who imported their ideologies from Europe. In other words, you are either against the totalitarians or you are with them. As the Arab Spring has shown us, the Middle East is much more complicated than a Manichean struggle between Islamic totalitarianism and Western liberalism. Moreover, democratization by the means of American bombs might not be all that democratic.

[Martin Lowery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book! Would give it 6 out of 5 stars if possible.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished a Sept 2024 essay at the Quillette site about Stokely Carmichael and antisemitism by Paul Berman. As a Columbia U class of '68, student of Edward Said, he knows the milieu in which he too was reared. Years ago, his book on his generation's turns and twists as the American New Left morphed, fractured, and warped stuck with me, but I didn't know until tracking a recommendation by a critic of similar insight, Douglas Murray, at UnHerd about Berman's follow-up study of Europe. It appeared in 2005, and although like any journalism feels dated as to hot topics since cooled, it's a valuable analysis of how those who strive to sustain their political careers after their student days fared, in terms of leading Germany as a unity, as the Cold War thaws into post-1989 responsibility.

He looks at Green leader Joscha Fischer, radical of Paris fame Danny "the Red" Cohn-Bendit, and Dr. Bernard Kouchner (a founder of Doctors Without Borders) as comrades who emerged to guide leftists into more considered, less emotive, mature methods of righting wrongs. Berman separates the hotheads of that era into the Stalinist-sympathizing Marxists, their competing less-blinkered Red factions, and the hippie libertarians opposed to Communism and authority, at least in principle not always applied consistently, as in the case of idolizing Che Guevara, instigator of Soviet-style mass labor camps in his adopted land of Cuba. Berman being of this ilk in his youthful fervor casts a steady eye on their ideals, delusions, attempted solutions, and subsequent entanglements into neo-liberalism, neo-con and pro-NATO, and Iraqi interventions in the 1990s and early 2000s post-9/11.

He's sharp on such themes as a critique of the author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran;" the anti-Nazi ideology that among the 1960s progressive ranks somehow blamed the post-war liberal American hegemony for perpetuating a similar racist and imperialist world-domination campaign; the twists that shifted the Palestinian cause from the far-left to the far-right and back and forth twice more at least during the 20th century; the ironies that doggedly attach themselves to the newly conservative converts who try to blame every ill on a passage uttered by a radical back circa 1969 (and this before social media as we know it...) His lessons on how those in high places can or cannot disavow their tempestuous slogans, their ignorant solidarities, their fatuous idol-worship, and their sincere vows to make their mark to contribute toward a greater good in a geopolitical minefield prove instructive.

[Chuck Urbin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An igniting piece of insight that competently, and critically details the marionette lines of the political left over the past century. It chronicles a performance across the world stage, utilizing a cast of interwoven 68ers. Each one a unique pin on the map, until you read along as Paul Berman begins to sketch out the webwork of global events that continually align the outcome of their trajectories.

I had two concerns coming into this book. One was that I had no previous knowledge of Joschka Fischer. This was not an issue, as I saw him primarily utilized as an archetypal model to help tether the cast of events together. The second concern I had, was whether or not this would be too preachy or headstrong. Thankfully, it was not. Berman was honest and thorough in relaying his understanding of the material, and did so in a way that was engaging for me to follow along with.

Think of it like a signaling blow-horn that could help sound off the alarm to land mines as we trudge forward into an unwritten future. Guided by the virtues of idealism and moral righteousness, it can be easy to stumble into the recurring pitfalls. Regardless of how honorable the intentions may seem. With exercised clarity, this book illustrates just how fickle it can be to adhere to a rigid moral compass, as competing ideals continually work to reorient the position of due north.

I wish this could have been required reading, back when I was still in school. A notable loss for the current generation of lefties, that it hasn’t become a staple within the Universities during the past decade since its original publication in 2007. I find it to be quite relevant to any generation that continues to make the same mistakes (as well as strides towards progress,) that have repeated themselves as the wheels of time churn onward.

[غبار · Rating 3 out of 5]

such a useful history, grippingly told, but it gets palestine dangerously, egregiously wrong, veers too close to ventriloquizing a viewpoint that equates the whole tradition of palestinian resistance with terrorism and antisemitism ...

[Jose Burga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dont let the title fool you, its not specific to a certain person orntime. This is a book about hard moral desicions politicians have to make.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Burma, May, 2008. The country is nine months removed from the brutal suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators led by Buddhist monks when Cyclone Nargis hits, leading to a massive humanitarian disaster. The West's only view of the destruction is through grainy pictures shot quickly from car windows by undercover reporters. But we know that something is going horribly wrong in Burma. And we are nearly powerless.

Frankfurt, April, 1973. During a violent street demonstration led by left-wing student activists, Joschka Fischer, the future German foreign minister, savagely beats a policeman and is briefly photographed. The pictures will be published almost 30 years later in Germany, creating a scandal which only heightens Fischer's popularity. Over the course of the 70's, Fischer and most of his comrades on the European "New Left" slowly move away from this type of violence (with some notorious exceptions such as The Red Brigade) and towards a more modest liberal government whose biggest foreign policy triumph is pushing NATO to intervene in Kosovo.

These two events do have something to do with one another if you buy into the central theory of Paul Berman's 2005 book Power and the Idealists. In it, Berman follows the "Generation of '68" from its radical beginnings through the Iraq war. Throughout, Berman argues that the 68'ers radicalism came about as a direct response (but not a "reactionary" response) to the fascism which maimed Europe during the 30's and 40's. The New Left's primary agenda in the late 60's and early 70's, according to Berman, was to prevent its reemergence.

Unfortunately for the New Left, their heroes, whether Stalinist, Maoist, or anarchist, soon began to exhibit the very fascist tendencies that they were trying to quash. This recognition led to such a severe fracture amongst the New Left that it ceased to exist as a viable, alternative political movement until the students grew up, grew moderate, and began to advocate a modest form of interventionalism which held, as a main principal, that governments could, theoretically, fight wars of humanitarian liberation in the face of severe tyranny.

Of course, things don't work out quite as easily in real life as they do on paper. Berman does a fine job of describing the conflicts between the New Left's politics and the reality of a world where tyrants exist from Sudan to Burma and the UN mission to Iraq was buried by a car bomb. Over the course of the book (which reads like a novel, not like a political essay), Berman touches on the contributions of non-governmental actors like Bernard Kouchner (who comes across as more impressive than any prime minister) and intellectuals like Adam Michnik (who, if Berman's thesis is correct, can rightly say "I told you so" to all of his more radical doubters from the 80's) and he never gets tied down in official government history. But at the end of the book we are left wondering, as Berman wonders, if the future holds a place for the Generation of 68's ideology. And our eyes turn to Burma and see...

[Richard]

In January 2001, Stern magazine in Germany published a series of shocking photographs of one of Europe’s leading politicians—Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister in that year. The photos showed Fischer as a young bully at a left-wing riot in 1973, beating up a policeman. In the European press, and eventually in the American press, the photos set off a massive accusation against the young radicals of the 1960s and their influence on modern life—a controversy that came to be known as “the trial of the Generation of 1968.”

Paul Berman tells the story of this scandal. And he answers the massive accusation by recounting the political evolution of several people from that generation—Fischer himself; Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the French student uprising of 1968; Dr. Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders; and others around the world.
Berman explains how, out of the leftism of circa 1968, a new kind of liberal and anti-totalitarian thinking slowly emerged—a moral logic that led some of the best-known ‘68ers to support the Kosovo War of 1999, and led those same people to quarrel bitterly with one another over the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War.

But mostly Berman tells a story. His story has the rhythm, complexity, characters and emotion of a novel. Yet this is not a novel.

This is the story of a rebellious spirit from the past, and how it has wended its way into the crises and traumas of our own time—a moving and sometimes puzzling story, disturbing, bracing, heart-breaking, and true.

[John-paul Pagano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Berman may care more about this topic than you -- the modern history of the Left, especially the New Left -- but this is a good read that feels like a rather stretched-out New Republic piece. Well, that's how all of Paul Berman's writing feels. You can sense his delight in rendering inside-baseball detail about groups like the Red Army Fraktion -- that's Fraktion, not "Faction" -- and the assortment of sillies, students and bipolar basketcases that played the '68 stage. The book is most interesting for its treatment of Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, who is its secret protagonist.

[Kersplebedeb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very enjoyable, easy to read book. The author is what i would call an "ex-leftist" and if not pro then at least agnostic about imperialism, in the vein of Christopher Hitchens or Norman Geras. That says, he spins a good tale, from what i know he gets his facts straight, and he does a good job at explaining the trajectory of those people from the 60s New Left who today think NATO and the united states play a positive role through their "humanitarian interventions".

You don't have to agree with someone to like their book.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

After becoming familiar with some of his previous work, I would never miss a performance by Mr. Berman. This extended essay is a aliquot of pure acid leaving behind few who have lived up to their promise. People of all sorts need to have a small, hard corpuscle that cannot be eroded by such a reducer.