Daedalus articles from September 2007

Daedalus archives from September 2007

Why the public interest matters now.
September 22, 2007... There are cycles in American politics beyond those involving Republicans and Democrats, left and right, progressive and conservative. There are also poles in our history defined by liberty and community, the individual and the collective, the...

An old debate renewed: the politics of the public interest.
September 22, 2007... Writing in 2006, Michael Tomasky--a well-known liberal intellectual and former editor of The American Prospect--created a stir by urging the Democratic Party to embrace a politics of the common good. Decent and forward-looking governance is...

Public interest lost?(Essay)
September 22, 2007... When the editors of Daedalus invited me, along with several others, to write an essay on the subject of the public interest, I will admit I had some qualms. For many years I edited a journal with Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol by that very...

Realizing the public interest: reflections on an elusive goal.
September 22, 2007... One would think that having edited for thirty years a journal titled The Public Interest, I should be clear on what the public interest is, how to determine it, and perhaps how to implement it. But after reading hundreds of articles by...

Economic policy in the public interest.(Essay)
September 22, 2007... Economists, whose discipline has always had a strong relationship to moral philosophy (Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations, also wrote the celebrated Theory of Moral Sentiments), have always seen their role in society as that of...

The commonwealth: our public legacy.
September 22, 2007... The Founders were, virtually to a person, steeped in the ideals and theories of the classic republics. Like John Adams and James Madison, Thomas Jefferson employed his knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin to study the original texts of the...

Governing in the public interest: then & now.
September 22, 2007... "Good policy is good politics" was one of Webster Todd's favorite political aphorisms. Twice chairman of the New Jersey State Republican Party, a behind-the-scenes party leader who was one of those who traveled to Paris to persuade Dwight...

Ethical politics: reality or illusion?(Essay)
September 22, 2007... It would be well, before reflecting on whether the idea of ethical politics is a reality or an illusion, to consider briefly the meaning of ethical politics, or to put it bluntly, whether many Americans see any relation between ethics and...

The lure & dangers of extremist rhetoric.
September 22, 2007... In a democracy, controversy is healthy. (1) Complex issues as far-ranging as immigration, health care, military interventions, taxation, and education seldom lend themselves to simple, consensual solutions. The public interest is well served by...

The flavors of economics & the public interest.
September 22, 2007... Two hundred years ago, the ancestor of today's economics was called political economy: it was political in that it had a strong connection with political philosophy and a focus on public policy. Nowadays, political economy is called classical...

Spring's So Sad, We Want to Know Why.(Poem)
September 22, 2007... Spring's so sad, we want to know why-- is it the mist that slips us from our baths with memory of warmth never to be ours? Beautiful isn't enough, she says, face floating near a simple oval bowl flowered beyond whatever we can know,...

Dilly.(short story)(Short story)
September 22, 2007... When I first met Dilly, my husband had just left me. He had left me for another woman, but I didn't know that, not at the time, although it seemed that everyone else knew. He had a lot of money, my husband, and he satisfied his conscience...

Dialogue between Cornel West & D. Graham Burnett; Metaphysics, money & the Messiah: a conversation about Melville's "The Confidence-Man".(Discussion)
September 22, 2007... Reality used to be a friend of mine... --P.M. Dawn Editor's note: This spring, the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett sat down with his colleague Cornel West to discuss their responses to a quintessentially American parable, "The...

Omer Bartov on Eastern Galicia's past & present.(Buchach city in Ukraine)(City overview)
September 22, 2007... Not many people in the United States, or for that matter, Europe, have heard of Buczacz (or Buchach), even though it was the hometown of Yosef Shmuel Agnon (1888-1970), the Nobel Prize laureate who recreated it in his novels and stories as a...

Harriet Ritvo on the animal turn.
September 22, 2007... Learned attention to animals is far from new. The scientific study of animals stretches back at least to Aristotle. Livestock have attracted the interest of scholars with either a practical or theoretical interest in agriculture. Critics of art...