Anderson in the NLR
By Chris Bertram reads Perry Anderson’s NLR piece on Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio on global justice so I don’t have to. Looks like more loud, public axe-grinding in a peer-reviewed journal. The NLR is still worth reading, but it’d be nice if they could go just one issue without an article that casually asserts that American foreign policy in Iraq and Kosovo are part of the same grand evil imperial project.
Furthermore, while I’m not much of a Rawlsian myself, and truth be told I’ve been party to a few unfair criticisms of Rawls in my day, I’m proud to say I’ve never mischaracterized his arguments for the purposes of incorrectly painting him as a war crime apologist. This reading seems so obviously mistaken, I’m tempted to call Bullshit on Anderson. But I won’t, because unlike Anderson, I believe in generous readings.