Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff was president of the Central European University in Budapest until 2021 and is a former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party. His books include a biography of Isaiah Berlin, The Rights Revolution, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror and The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World.

Homo Sexualis

Michael Ignatieff, 4 March 1982

Is a history of sexuality possible? It is easy to envisage a history of the language of enticement, the trail of clothes on the floor, the bed even, but the coupling, the thing itself, how could we nail that to the historian’s rack? An instinct timeless in its force, an experience at once private, secret and charmingly individual, how could it be made to submit to dates and social determination? It is easier to admit that the language of love knows its different tropes and turns in time than to admit that, if this is so, the experience it represents must have a history too. Sex is one of the last citadels to hold out against the sappers of historicism, one of the few domains in which it remains common to speak of a constant human nature and universal human experience.

Letter

It’s a riot

20 August 1981

SIR: According to Gerald Lynn, what can’t be said about the recent riots is that they are an expression of black people’s frustration at their ‘inherent inability’ to succeed according to white standards of achievement. He wishes to know whether I am ‘concerned’ that exponents of views such as his have had difficulty in securing access to television and ‘respected literary reviews’....

It’s a riot

Michael Ignatieff, 20 August 1981

The morning after Toxteth and Moss Side, the Daily Express front page asked its readers ‘HOW MUCH MORE MUST WE TAKE?’ This ‘we’ lends itself to easy caricature. It is ‘Outraged, Tunbridge Wells’ writ large, an army of indignant blue rinse. It is the passive ‘we’ of embattled parents, distributing blame to the ungrateful children with the aggrieved cry ‘What have we done to deserve this?’

Mad or bad?

Michael Ignatieff, 18 June 1981

During his summation at the Old Bailey trial of Peter Sutcliffe, Mr Justice Boreham felt called upon to remind the jury that they were there to judge Sutcliffe, not the flock of psychiatrists called to testify as to his mental condition. The jury could have been forgiven for believing that psychiatry, not Sutcliffe, was in the dock, for during the trial, the profession and its discourse were subjected to merciless inquisition. The jury’s verdict implied the professionally mortifying conclusion that the doctors had indeed been duped. Yet if Sutcliffe fooled the doctors, he also appears to have taken in the Attorney-General, who accepted his plea of diminished responsibility.

The central dynamic of global politics since 11 September 2001 has been the profound shift in the nature of American foreign policy. After the end of the Second World War, the United States...

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Dangers of Discretion: international law

Alex de Waal, 21 January 1999

Over a century ago, Gustave Moynier, a stocky middle-aged Genevan lawyer, author and philanthropist, proposed an international court to enforce respect for the Geneva Convention. Moynier was the...

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Moderation or Death: Isaiah Berlin

Christopher Hitchens, 26 November 1998

In​ The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and...

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Among the quilters

Peter Campbell, 21 March 1991

Asya, the heroine of Michael Ignatieff’s novel of revolution and exile, is born into an aristocratic Russian family in 1900. As a child, she nearly drowns walking out over the thawing ice...

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The Charm before the Storm

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 9 July 1987

Stuck in the country, bored and vaguely discontented, with themselves, their lives or the way things are, half the heroes in Russian fiction appear to be waiting for something to happen while the...

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Dependence and Danger

Paul Seabright, 4 July 1985

Is it possible for the aspirations of politics in mass societies to be informed by that central tradition in art, religion and psychology which emphasises the world of personal relationships as...

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The Great Scots Education Hoax

Rosalind Mitchison, 18 October 1984

Historians of any society have to learn to be wary of the accepted myths of their subject. Sometimes these bogus visions of the past are deliberately created or fostered by the governing group....

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