The Past Is a…Native Land?

Did the events of September 11, 2001 “change the world,” signifying the birth of an incommensurable brave new world of heightened uncertainty and insecurity? No. That headline-grabbing claim lacks historical perspective. Rather, the Cold War has exerted a profound impact on how America wages the War on Terror simply because the intelligence, bureaucratic, and military-industrial institutions that have shaped U.S. strategy since 9/11 took their present shape during the Cold War. Indeed, dramatic differences between the circumstances of the Cold War era and the dangers confronting the twenty-first century prevail, among them the shift from “conventional” to digital warfare, and from ominous nation-states to “rogue” states and sects. But the respective challenges and constraints shared by the two periods also possess notable similarities. Both the obvious discontinuities and the more subtle continuities with the recent past require judicious assessment from us today. Just as American leaders before World War II needed to “unlearn” the lessons of isolationalism in the 1930s in order to fight World War II, so too do American policymakers today need to unlearn the lessons of conventional warfare—including “intelligence” warfare–in order to combat rogue states and terrorist cells in the twenty-first century.     

The Intellectual Species: Evolution or Extinction?

John Rodden summarizes the thrust of his work on modern intellectual life, the theme of which is that the uncertain future of the ``intellectual species`` warrants extended attention because it is inextricably tied to the ultimate fate of the critical intellectual itself. He presents himself as an aspirant to membership in the tradition of the literary-political intellectual represented by such writers as George Orwell, Albert Camus, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Howe. Their example confronts him with the question around which his own writings orbit, as the title of his essay poses it: "The Intellectual Species: Evolution or Extinction?"     

The Literary Interview as Public Performance

The interview is a genre “coming of age,” maturing into a serious art form. This essay presents a typology for understanding this growth and how diverse patterns of literary performance have contributed to it. Five types of interviewees are discussed at length: traditionalist, raconteur, advertiser, provocateur, and prevaricator. Some speculations about national and cultural types of interviewees are also broached.     

The Achilles Heel of Plurality Systems: Geography and Representation in Multiparty Democracies

Building on the unfinished research program of Gudgin and Taylor (1979), we analytically derive the linkage between a party's territorial distribution of support and the basic features of its vote‐seat curve. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the corresponding empirical model with an analysis of elections in postwar Great Britain, focusing in particular on the transformation of the Liberals from a territorially concentrated to a dispersed party in the 1970s. We show that majoritarian biases increase with the number of parties, and majoritarian systems harm small parties when their vote is more dispersed than average, and large parties when their vote is more concentrated than average. Moreover, the evolving experiences of Labour and Conservatives demonstrate how a party's territorial support, and hence its expected seat premium or penalty, changes with its electoral fortunes. This model has a wide variety of applications in multiparty majoritarian democracies around the world.