"Bernard-Henri Levy, one of the world's leading intellectuals, revisits his political roots, scrutinizes the totalitarianisms of the past as well as those on the horizon, and argues powerfully for a new political and moral vision for our times. Are human rights Western or universal? Does anti-Semitism have a future, and, if so, what will it look like? And how is it that progressives themselves - those who in the past defended individual rights and fought fascism - have now become the breeding ground for new kinds of dangerous attitudes: an unthinking loathing of Israel; an obsessive anti-Americanism; an idea of "tolerance" that, in its justification of Islamic fanaticism, for example, could become the "cemetery of democracies"; and an indifference, masked by relativism, to the greatest human tragedies facing the world today? Illuminating these and other questions, Levy also brings to life his own intellectual autobiography, highlighting the thinkers and politicians he has known and scrutinized and the ideological battles he has fought over thirty years - revealing their bearing on the present." "Above all, Levy offers a powerful new vision for progressives everywhere, one based neither on the failed idealisms of the past nor on their current misguided, bigoted, and dangerously sentimental attachments but on an absolute commitment to combat evil in all its guises. The "new barbarism" Levy compellingly diagnoses is real and must be confronted. At a time of ideological and political transition in America, Left in Dark Times is a polemical, incendiary articulation of the threats we all face - in many cases without our even being aware of it - and a stand against those threats."--Jacket.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [215]-222) and index.
Processing Action (note)
committed to retain
Contents
Preface -- Introduction -- pt. 1. What's left of the left. -- And upon this ruin ... -- Primal scenes -- My primal scenes -- Act, then listen -- Note on a fire -- pt. 2. Thirty years later. -- How we're less sanctimonious -- A secret calendar of the history of this century -- On the new philosophy and its place in its time -- The return of the ghosts -- pt. 3. Critique of neo-progressive reason. -- Liberalism is their enemy -- Once upon a time, Europe -- The other socialism of the imbeciles -- Counterattack on the "empire" -- The new anti-semitism will be progressive or nothing at all -- Fascislamism -- The new struggle of the universals -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index.