Power & the Idealists

The student uprisings of 1968 expressed a generational attitude about politics, the corrupt nature of democratic capitalism and the evil of military interventions. Yet, thirty-five years later, many in that radical generation had come into conventional positions of power: among them Bill Clinton (who reportedly stayed up all night reading this book) and Joschka Fischer, the foreign minister of Germany. During a 1970s street protest, Fischer was photographed beating a policeman to the ground; during the 1990s, he supported Clinton in a NATO-led military intervention in the Balkans. Here Paul Berman, "one of America's best exponents of recent intellectual history" (The Economist), traces the intellectual and moral evolution of an impassioned generation - and gives an acute analysis of what it means to go to war in the name of democracy and human rights.