Caesar wept

Jan-Werner Müller: Trolling the Libs, 4 December 2025

... who favoured the idea of a ‘living constitutionalism’, got off more lightly. One of them, Ronald Dworkin (who had conveniently died in 2013), was even enlisted in Vermeule’s common-good project. Dworkin had understood the importance of identifying the morality underlying a constitution; the problem was that his view of morality was liberal. Contrary ...

Towards the Precipice

Robert Brenner: The Continuing Collapse of the US Economy, 6 February 2003

... has invoked the need for both stimulus and security in order to rationalise a return to Reagan’s old formula of imperial adventure, tax cuts for the rich and increases in military spending. But the proposed elimination of the tax on dividends isn’t aimed at raising demand any more than the war on Iraq, and its associated expenditure on ...

Gloves Off

Glen Newey: Torture, 29 January 2009

Death by a Thousand Cuts 
by Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon and Gregory Blue.
Harvard, 320 pp., £22.95, March 2008, 978 0 674 02773 2
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Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story 
by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris.
Picador, 286 pp., £8.99, January 2009, 978 0 330 45201 4
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Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law 
by Philippe Sands.
Allen Lane, 315 pp., £20, May 2008, 978 1 84614 008 2
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... in interrogation policy in a memo to Bush in 2002, had impugned the protocol, while serving in the Reagan administration, in a National Interest article in 1985. It relies on a principle that Feith stressed in his interview with Sands – namely, reciprocity. Protocol II makes clear that the provisions apply to armed groups locally powerful enough to be held ...

You have £2000, I have a kidney

Glen Newey: Morals and Markets, 21 June 2012

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets 
by Michael Sandel.
Allen Lane, 244 pp., £20, April 2012, 978 1 84614 471 4
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How Much Is Enough?: The Love of Money and the Case for the Good Life 
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky.
Allen Lane, 256 pp., £20, June 2012, 978 1 84614 448 6
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... it was hoped, even those at the bottom of the heap would have enough for a decent life. Even under Reagan, supply-siders reached for the rhetoric of ‘trickledown’ to justify corporate tax breaks. And modern ‘sufficientarians’, who agree that policy should aim at getting everyone up to a minimum threshold rather than at full equality, also think growth ...

Iraq, 2 May 2005

Andrew O’Hagan: Two Soldiers, 6 March 2008

... family, the Kellys, who came to Boston from Ireland before the Second World War. Eileen married Ronald Charles Spahr of Philadelphia, the son of German immigrants, and in the late 1950s the couple moved to a three-bedroom colonial house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which is fairly close to Philadelphia. Everyone you ask speaks of the Spahrs as a classic ...