by Casey Blake

Some recommended reading for those seeking a break from all the campaign news. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre offers an important response to what he describes as the "fragmentation of the university" in the current issue of Commonweal. Even those who don't share MacIntyre's theological commitments should ponder his proposal for a more coherent undergraduate curriculum. Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin have written a new manifesto for liberalism, "We Answer to the Name of Liberals," for the November issue of The American Prospect that has been endorsed by several contributors to the Open University blog. In its critique of the Iraq war and call for social-democratic reform at home, the Ackerman-Gitlin statement strikes me as far more compelling than the so-called Euston Manifesto. Finally, Jackson Lears's essay in the Summer 2006 issue of Raritan on J. William Fulbright's 1966 classic, The Arrogance of Power, is to my mind one of the few great pieces of political criticism produced during the "War on Terror." Lears concludes, "Fulbright! You should be living at this hour." Indeed.