PanThe New Republic... a manifesto or summa of his efforts to convert Kissinger’s critics and would-be prosecutors into his students ... What Gewen doesn’t say is that some high policymakers have found...Kissinger’s \'grim vantage point\' perversely reassuring because it reinforces presumptions of their own dark omniscience, unappreciated by the rest of us. The inevitability of tragedy helps them to excuse their blunders and outrages as necessary costs of braving what Donald Rumsfeld memorably called the \'unknown unknowns\' that bedevil all grand strategists ... Gewen acknowledges that serious, well-informed people have condemned Kissinger’s work as immoral and destructive. But he mentions many of the most substantial charges only very briefly on his way to rebutting or mitigating them ... Gewen’s rendering of Kissinger’s Realpolitik leaves very little room for democracy.
Anthony T. Kronman
PanLos Angeles Review of BooksTo put it gently, Kronman’s ideal of humanist education...has become, in his new book, a dogma whose plausible criticisms of cookie-cutter diversity, chilled speech, and politicized public memories are misapplied to events whose origins and ironies he misses completely. Contrary to Kronman’s formulations, today’s storms of negation aren’t \'democratic\' but are provoked from above, diverting democratic passions in order to entrench elitist distinctions of rank. The riot that’s sweeping over the colleges and drowning their humanism is originating from economic and political powers that orchestrate the rage of multitudes they’ve dispossessed. (Has Kronman ever attended a Trump rally?) It’s not coming mainly from 19-year-old students and campus mentors who register these far-more-dangerous developments, like hyper-sensitive barometers or canaries in a coal mine, often doing so maladroitly, to be sure, but often more constructively than Kronman acknowledges ... Yet some of Kronman’s arguments are well wrought and would be easier to ponder had he applied and integrated them more judiciously into his account. He isn’t wrong to warn...that effervescences of democratic negation can asphyxiate humanism and liberal democracy ... Kronman’s fundamental mistake is to embed his plausible arguments in provocative but vague paeans to \'human greatness\' and \'aristocratic\' superiority and in his seething accounts of particular developments at Yale and other universities that offend his standards but that also respond to realities he barely acknowledges or else condemns.
