Charlie Rose

mabraham  01/20/2011 03:38 AM Report

I don't get why BHL has such an appeal in some American circles. The guy is a complete fraud and has become a laughing stock in his native France. (He inherited one of France's largest estates and has used it to buy influence into French media for the last thirty-five years.)

A good summary of this pathetic poseur can be found here:

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/the_lies_of_bernard_henri_leacutevy/

ShalomFreedman  01/18/2011 02:05 PM Report

Bernard Henri Levy is a courageous and responsible writer and public intellectual. I would very much like to read the exchange between him and Houcellbeq. But Levy has a tendency to exaggerate and bit. I appreciate his defending Judaism but his definition of Judaism is extremely subjective. What he really wanted to get at was the idea of 'tikkun olam' which many modern Jewish thinkers such as Yitz Greenberg and Shlomo Riskin make central to their thought. The idea is basically that our task in the world is to improve it and recreate it in such a way as to provide a more loving and ethical life for mankind. Perhaps Levy wanted to say this but the English language got in his way.

In any case despite all the shtick he is a truly formidable person and to be admired for his efforts to right wrongs, and do justice in the world.

REMant  01/17/2011 01:22 PM Report

While it is true that no one exchanges letters like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson did, it should be noted that they did so long after having retired from the national stage, and, nevertheless, in that era there was no shortage of "newspaper wars," name-calling or riots.

An outspoken Jew, journalist and capitalist, as well as philosophe, Mr Lévy is no stranger to, shall we say, public relations, and liberal cant. Too, he is the third husband of the Bardotesque bombshell, Arielle Dombasle, which suggests to me something of his personality. The French have a long history of "politesse" - avoiding giving offense by simply hiding it behind formalities - which has done nothing to soften their pugnaciousness, and he, himself, has sued critics who charged him with shallowness and trading on his influence. So I wouldn't be inclined to give much credence to the ideas put forward here, even if he and his fellow-travellers weren't known for their denunciation of reason ala Berlin and Hayek (in one of his stupider outings). They would, if over here, certainly be among those denouncing the Founders and Constitution, as they have the Enlightenment, tho what they would put in its place, as with Marx, whom they inconsistently also eschew, remains a mystery. If you want to really improve things, you have to solve problems by forming a larger perspective, which puts differences in context and dissolves them. I must say the Rose show has performed as a platform for its share of these types in the past, from both parties. Their collective error is in mistaking, like Popper, the origins of authoritarianism, which lies rather in their own assumptions. Like the evangelical Whigs they believe in a golden age, and especially love those events that allow them to feel victimized, however, when things don't work out, they are the first to scream for police, because, of course, it must be someone else's fault, despite what the Bible says about it. Theirs is really a continuation of Machiavelli's attack on philosophy in the Church, and of the Counter-Reformation. Coming out recently against multiculturalism, apparently for the wrong reasons, their own idea of community is an interest-group pluralism, which they mistakenly credit Tocqueville with. It is not Cicero's civil society, but more akin to Hans Baron's confused civic humanism. This idea re-emerged and took off during the Reagan-Greenspan years, and like neo-conservatism it was as much opposed to actual free-trade as to what was perceived as tyranny. And we know what it has issued in.