{"id":1114,"date":"2006-06-10T00:39:03","date_gmt":"2006-06-10T00:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:47","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:47","slug":"another_step_to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1114","title":{"rendered":"Another Step Toward A Decent – And Effective – Left"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Cooper<\/a> points me at an interview with Fred Halliday<\/a>, historian and one of the former editors of the New Left Review.<\/p>\n

Halliday’s journey – from the ‘indecent’ to the ‘decent’ Left matters, as does Norm Geras’<\/a> (and mine, for that matter), because the tropes we hear on the news are pale reflections of the ideas we read in places like TAP, which are in turn less-strident reflections of what is being said in the Academy. Which are echoes of what was said there a generation ago.<\/p>\n

Just as the project of creating an environment for reform in the Islamic world is a generation-long one (read Thomas Kuhn if you’d like to know why), the process of recapturing the Western, Social-Democratic Left from the place where it fell off the tracks in the late 1960’s will take a generation as well.<\/p>\n

Halliday:<\/p>\n

The issue of rights is absolutely central. We have to hold the line at the defense, however one conceptualizes things, however de-hegemonized, of universal principles of rights. This is how I locate my own political and historical vision\u2014it is my starting point. What this means very practically, to cut a long story short, is the issue of intervention. It seems to me that certain interventions in defense of rights are justified\u2014Bosnia and Kosovo, to take two obvious examples, or the defense of the Kurds in Iraq in 1990-1991. The New Left Review and others on that wing of the Left attack not just these particular interventions, but the very concept of rights\u2014and are consistent in doing so. My fundamental disagreement with the Review, and with Tariq, is really about this.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Once you start talking about defending individual rights, you are fundamentally talking about some variant of Enlightenment liberalism. That’s a good thing, in my view, and deserves to be encouraged. Read the whole thing, and be happy that this change is starting to happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A former editor of the New Left Review decides that individual rights matter. Thousands cheer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}