The Public Interest articles from September 2001

The Public Interest archives from September 2001

The idea of compassion: The British vs. the French Enlightenment.
September 22, 2001... THE "politics of compassion" has become a term of derision. Applied by conservatives to liberals, it suggests a soft-hearted and, worse, soft-minded approach to social problems, in which sentiment prevails over reason, intentions over results,...

The British underclass: Ten years later.
September 22, 2001... As the 1980s came to an end, the Sunday Times asked me to come to England and look at the country's social problems through the eyes of an American who had been writing about the American underclass. The questions: Does England have an...

What about the overclass?
September 22, 2001... LIKE a number of people, I hate the term "underclass" because it suggests that there is a group of people who are an inferior and frightening breed apart. Though it would never use the term "underclass," the current British government has...

America--idea or nation?
September 22, 2001... AT first glance, American patriotism seems a simple matter. But it is simple only until one actually starts to think about it, inquire after its sources, and investigate its manifestations. Consider a small but significant case in point, an...

The transformation of liberalism, 1964 to 2001.
September 22, 2001... We are engaged in a great adventure--as great as that of the last century, when our fathers marched to the western frontier. Our frontier today is of human beings, not of land. Lyndon Johnson, Message on the Civil Rights Bill TODAY,...

Jane Addams and the social claim.
September 22, 2001... MOST Americans of middle age or older have heard of Jane Addams. Didn't she have something to do with immigrants and social work? "She was a socialist, right?" queried an academic friend when I told her I was at long last writing my "Jane...

The costs and benefits of cost-benefit analysis.
September 22, 2001... ARGUMENTS over public policies have a way of taking on a life of their own, coming to exist almost without reference to the policies themselves. Before a policy has been adopted, when everything is still up for grabs and the stakes are high,...

Bringing up baby.(history of parenting)
September 22, 2001... IN the middle ages, the idea of childhood did not exist, the French historian Phillipe Aries once famously said. He was surely wrong about this, for childhood is a human universal. In Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our...

Understanding Heidegger.(Martin Heidegger)
September 22, 2001... MANY consider Martin Heidegger to be the twentieth century's most significant philosopher. Arendt, Lowith, Strauss, Kojeve, Gadamer, and Marcuse studied with him; Jaspers, Bultmann, Sartre, and Derrida wrote books heavily influenced by his...

The city of God in the city of man.
September 22, 2001... FOR centuries, the Roman Catholic church was the most self-conscious and determined critic of "the modern project." It identified liberal democracy with the Enlightenment's efforts to free mankind from any natural or supernatural restraints on...

Debating evolution.
September 22, 2001... SCIENCE'S world view is usually said to be cold and abstract, but in fact it offers a far more exciting, if more threatening, image than the Biblical account of the creation of the world. In his latest book, The Evolutionists: The Struggle for...