Polity Press

The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks revived familiar lines of debate about the significance of terrorism. On one side are those who believe that 9/11 brought into stark relief a deadly new challenge to our values and existence, an enemy that must be faced resolutely and fought on every front. On the other are those who believe that 9/11 gave birth (or rebirth) not to a new form of threat but to a noxious form of politics: self-righteous, muscular and xenophobic. It is to this stand-off that Robert Goodin makes a refreshing and much-needed contribution. Goodin is a rare commodity: a political philosopher who remains resolutely focused on the problems and controversies that bedevil the real world of politics and policy. His most recent offering, What’s Wrong with Terrorism?, sets out to make a ‘moral assessment of the phenomenon of terrorism and reactions to it’, asking: ‘what is the distinctive wrong of terrorism? … what makes terrorists different from, and morally even worse than, ordinary murderers, kidnappers, and so on?’

The editors of Conversations with Gore Vidal – a recently published selection of interviews conducted with Vidal over the course of his long career – introduce the volume by quoting a comment made in the New Yorker in 1960: ‘Nothing’s easier nowadays than to get the feeling of being surrounded by Gore Vidal.’ They go on to remark that, today: ‘Gore Vidal is again seemingly everywhere.’ Although this is something of an exaggeration, it is true that Vidal and his diverse oeuvre appear to have received more serious attention in the past few years than previously. Now eighty years old, this unique and often controversial figure in American culture has lived long enough to see accepted into the mainstream several of his ideas once regarded as outrageous or ‘unpatriotic’. Indeed, as a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer, quoted by Altman, remarked in 2004: ‘Vidal may be in tune with the zeitgeist again …’

I should read my email more carefully. Like many, I have to admonish myself thus at regular intervals, but it doesn’t always work. This review is a case in point. When invited to review a book on ‘sex and pleasure’, this request stood out from an unread e-mail queue that was uncomfortably long. I had just published a book myself on the history of sexuality (Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution), so the topic had appeal, but, in my haste to reply, I neglected the qualifying phrase ‘in Western Culture’. To my horror, I opened Gail Hawkes’s book only to be confronted with an immediate ethical dilemma (and given my current role as Dean of an Arts Faculty, I could do without another one). Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture covers substantially the same ground as my book: from Ancient Greece to the present day. Even some of our chapter divisions overlapped: classical antiquity; early Christianity; the medieval era; the early modern period and so on. How could I approach a review in the dispassionate way this art requires, when troubled by insidious fears that this might be a better book?

The end of the Cold War in 1991 sparked a great debate about the fate of the international order and, in particular, of the so-called Westphalian system in which nation-states were the main actors. Since the end of the bloody Wars of Religion in 1648, there has been, in short, a sort of understanding that the international system should concern itself with wars between states, not wars within states. The problem is, however, that many conflicts today belong in the second category. In its endeavours to keep the peace, the international community has to adjust to this reality. The question is how.

Reviewing a book is rarely a simple exercise and those who think it is should pause before accepting the commission. It is a delicate exercise, this balancing of critique, subjectivity, envy and even-handedness. You never quite know if you have hit the right balance. A nagging fear of being ungracious, and revealing too much of the self, can result in days of procrastination. This degree of difficulty is multiplied when reviewing a book that directly attacks one’s chosen way of life, as is the case in this book’s denunciation of gay male sexual practice. So let me be honest. I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into when I agreed to review Sheila Jeffreys’s latest lesbian feminist offering, Unpacking Queer Politics. Nine years ago, I wrote a review of Jeffreys’s work for a postgraduate politics journal. It was a ‘swingeing critique’ - a phrase Jeffreys deploys frequently in Unpacking Queer Politics when she approvingly cites likeminded theorists - and Dr Jeffreys was none too pleased. As we both worked in the same building at Melbourne University, this made for some uncomfortable elevator rides.