Discover the Best Books Written by Paul Berman

Paul Lawrence Berman (born 1949) is an American writer on politics and literature. His books include Terror and Liberalism (a New York Times best-seller in 2003), The Flight of the Intellectuals, A Tale of Two Utopias, Power and the Idealists, and an illustrated children's book, Make-Believe Empire. He edited, among other anthologies, Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems for the American Poets Project of the Library of America.

Born to a Jewish family, Berman attended Columbia University, receiving an M.A. in American history in 1973. Berman was a longtime contributor to The Village Voice, then The New Republic. He is a critic-at-large at Tablet, a member of the editorial board of Dissent, and an Advisory Editor at Fathom. He has been awarded fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations and the Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers at the New York Public Library. He was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

In Terror and Liberalism, Berman offers a theory of totalitarianism. In his interpretation, totalitarian movements of the right and the left arose in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War as a reaction to the successes and failures of liberal civilization. The ideologies promoted mythologies of world events that were paranoid, apocalyptic, utopian, obsessed with purity, and ultimately nihilist. In Berman's account, the totalitarian movements were mass mobilizations for unattainable aims.

Berman traces these European movements' influence on the modern Muslim world. He identifies two principal totalitarian tendencies in Muslim countries, Baathism and radical Islamism – mutually hostile movements whose doctrines, in his interpretation, overlap and have allowed for alliances. Berman regards suicide terror and the cult of martyrdom as a re-emergence of totalitarianism's nihilist strand.

Berman draws a distinction between the religion of Islam, founded in the 7th century, and the political movement of radical Islamism. In July 2010, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "Islamism is a modern, instead of an ancient, political tendency, which arose in a spirit of fraternal harmony with the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and '40s."

In Berman's interpretation, observers relying on modern liberal values have sometimes found it difficult to identify the anti-liberal and anti-rational quality of totalitarian movements. Berman proposed this argument and offered an explanation based on the "rationalist naiveté" concept in Terror and Liberalism. He developed the argument further in The Flight of the Intellectuals.

Berman's ideas have influenced writers such as Martin Amis and Bernard-Henri Lévy, helping to shape debates about the concept of the "post-left" in Britain. Amis invokes Berman's argument in the opening paragraph of his book on 9/11, The Second Plane (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), p. ix. Regarding Lévy, see p. 269 of his book American Vertigo (NY: Random House, 2006) and an article in The American Interest. In explaining his switch to support for the wider war on terror, British journalist Nick Cohen cited Terror and Liberalism as a major influence: "The only time I realized I was charging up a blind alley was when I read Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism. 

I didn't see a blinding light or hear a thunder clap or cry 'Eureka!' If I were going to cry anything, it would have been 'Oh bloody hell!' ... I would have to turn it around and see the world afresh. The labor would involve reconsidering everything I'd written since 11 September, arguing with people I took to be friends, and finding myself on the same side as people I took to be enemies. All because of Berman."

Berman's approach has not been without its critics. A writer in The Nation magazine, Anatol Lieven, labeled Berman a "Philosopher king" of the liberal hawks and criticized him for "[promoting] and [justifying] the most dangerous aspect of the Bush Administration's approach to the war on terrorism: the lumping together of radically different elements in the Muslim world into one homogeneous enemy camp." Berman has also been criticized in books by the liberal sociologist Alan Wolfe and the neo-Marxist political theorist Robert Meister.