Gustav Jönsson is an essayist and critic based in London.
The last years of the Weimar Republic are often thought to have witnessed an outpouring of politically engaged literature. But the history is more complicated. Writers more often avoided antagonizing a resurgent right to protect their lives and careers.
The French writer Raymond Aron is often praised by liberals for his nuanced, nonideological thinking. In reality, he lived in the pocket of the CIA and gave an intellectual veneer to NATO’s imperialistic foreign policy.
George Orwell managed to combine a conservative temperament with a socialist rejection of oppression. A lively new biography of the English radical explains how he held these contradictions together.
A new book, We May Dominate the World, attempts to provide a realist explanation of US foreign policy in Latin America. As with other such accounts, it treats differences of power as inevitable sources of conflict.
In Different Speeds, Same Furies, Britain’s preeminent Marxist, Perry Anderson, produces an idiosyncratic but dazzling account of Anthony Powell and Marcel Proust, arguably the two greatest novelists of the 20th century.
The Francoist regime is one of the few fascist governments that mainstream politicians and writers feel comfortable praising publicly. They shouldn’t: on top of anti-communism, antisemitism was also central to Francisco Franco’s reign of terror.
Despite the mass of evidence proving Martin Heidegger’s Nazi commitment, academics often dismiss concerns about his politics as nonphilosophical. Two new books make a compelling case for rejecting this line of argument.