Christopher Caldwell

• Politics January 1, 2014

  Milton Friedman. In the 1970s and ’80s, the world’s most advanced economies were reconstructed on the basis of principles that had until recently been thought the “prattle of outmoded cranks,” as the Johns Hopkins historian Angus Burgin puts it. But the cranks had a point, and in The Great Persuasion, Burgin gives a sympathetic account […]
• Culture May 9, 2011

  Last year, Karl Zéro, the madcap newsman/comedian who has been a fixture on French television for a decade, asked the sixty-one-year-old celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy why people hated him so. Christopher Caldwell is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (Doubleday, 2009).
• Politics January 1, 1

  If we accept the description of war that emerged from the trenches of World War I—“boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror”—then the Cold War, despite appearances, really was a war. It was the most destructive thing the human race had ever contemplated. The Soviet Union had forty-three thousand nuclear warheads, the United States roughly the same. These weapons were many times more powerful than the bombs with which the US leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.