General duvida que Dilma tenha sido torturada na ditadura

E lança suspeita sobre participação da presidente em atentado

MIRIAM LEITÃO

Publicado:1/03/12 - 23h52

Atualizado:4/03/12 - 22h10

General Luiz Eduardo Rocha PaivaREPRODUÇÃO TV

RIO - O general Luiz Eduardo Rocha Paiva acha que a Comissão da Verdade, para não ser “parcial e maniqueísta”, tem que convocar também os que participaram de ações armadas, direta ou indiretamente. Não hesita em perguntar até se a presidente Dilma Rousseff não tem que depor:

- Ela era da VAR-Palmares, que lançou o carro-bomba que matou o soldado Mario Kozel Filho. A comissão não vai chamá-la, por quê?

Rocha Paiva se refere ao atentado ocorrido em 26 de junho de 1968 no Quartel-General do II Exército, em São Paulo. Até 2007 Rocha Paiva ocupava posição de destaque no Exército. Foi comandante da Escola de Comando do Estado-Maior do Exército e secretário-geral do Exército. Abaixo, trechos da entrevista:

O GLOBO: Por que o senhor é contra a Comissão da Verdade?

ROCHA PAIVA: Eu sou contra a Comissão da Verdade, agora não adianta ser contra. Ela vai existir. Era contra no momento em que ela pretende apurar a memória histórica do país. Isso é trabalho para pesquisadores e para historiadores e não para uma comissão, que eu vejo como uma comissão chapa branca. Ela busca a reconciliação nacional depois de 30 anos, e não há mais cisão　nenhuma, que tenha ficado do regime militar, inclusive porque as Forças Armadas são instituições da mais alta credibilidade no país. Então, não vejo a necessidade. Acho que se há alguma coisa a investigar é só usar a　Policia Federal e, com vontade política, a presidente tem autoridade pra ir até onde ela quiser, respeitada a Lei de Anistia. Eu fiz uma análise da lei da Comissão Nacional da Verdade. E eu vejo que　essa lei não é imparcial. Esse facciosismo e o provável maniqueísmo 　do seu relatório a gente pode ver a partir dos 　objetivos.

Por que o senhor acha que é parcial?

ROCHA PAIVA: O objetivo é promover o esclarecimento de torturas, mortes, desaparecimentos forçados e ocultação de cadáveres.　Por que não promover também o esclarecimento de atentados terroristas e sequestros de pessoas e aviões e de execução e justiçamento até de companheiros da luta armada que tentavam desertar? Ora, a pessoa pode　alegar, na comissão, que isso não é objeto da lei, mas tinha que ser objeto da lei. O outro objetivo da lei é tornar públicos os locais e instituições e instâncias onde ocorreram violações de direitos humanos. Ora, por que não　também tornar 　públicos os locais de cativeiros de sequestrados, os locais de atentados terroristas e as áreas de homizio da luta armada, dos grupos armados dos partidos ilegais que conspiravam não para trazer liberdade para o país e democracia, mas para implantar aqui uma ditadura totalitária comunista?

O argumento de quem defende a lei é de que quem esteve contra o regime foi punido. Foi preso, foi torturado, foi exilado. E o Estado exercia o poder. E exerceu o poder contra o cidadão de forma　autoritária, de forma abusiva. O que o senhor acha desse argumento?

ROCHA PAIVA: Eu acho que ele não cola. Pelo seguinte: nem todos os assassinos, terroristas, nem todos os sequestradores são conhecidos. Alguns que executaram a ação, sim, são conhecidos. Outros que planejaram　ou estiveram no apoio logístico e no financiamento, esses não são conhecidos. Então, eles deveriam ser conhecidos também.

Por que os militares quando tinham todo o poder não fizeram essa apuração?

ROCHA PAIVA: Às vezes, não havia condições de fazer. Não houve possibilidade de fazer. porque se estava combatendo grupos armados que estavam executando operações. Veja bem uma coisa: a lei estabelece que as　atividades da comissão não terão caráter persecutório e jurisdicional. No entanto, o ministro Ayres de Britto, do STF reconheceu, em parecer, à revelia da Lei da Anistia, o direito daqueles que se sentiram vítimas do regime　militar moverem ações civis indenizatórias contra ex-agentes do Estado. Ora, se houve anistia, quem tem que indenizar, como já está fazendo, é o Estado. No momento que o ministro Ayres Britto abre esse precedente,　quem for ouvido na comissão da Verdade poderá estar produzindo provas contra si próprio. Agora, ele abriu um precedente também e aí é que eu digo que a Comissão da Verdade, embora não esteja disposta a investigar　os crimes da luta armada, se uma pessoa foi vítima de uma ação da luta armada, e ficou com sequelas, ela também tem o direito, até baseada no parecer do ministro Ayres de Britto, de mover ações civis indenizatórias　contra esses guerrilheiros, terroristas, que numa ação armada deixaram uma vítima ou sequela em alguém. Eles terão direito, se não for investigado o que foi feito pela luta armada,　essas pessoas não saberão quem são os responsáveis por suas sequelas. E a Justiça é igual para todos.

O senhor não acha que é preciso saber o que aconteceu com as 183 pessoas que desapareceram, entre eles pessoas que não tinham nenhum envolvimento　com um órgão clandestino. Isso sem levar em conta que o que era legal e o que era ilegal era estabelecido por um governo que não foi eleito, era uma ditadura. Portanto a ilegalidade de alguns partidos é questionável. O ex-deputado Rubens Paiva sumiu dentro de uma guarnição do Exército. Ele foi preso, levado para o Terceiro Comar, e depois, de lá, para um quartel da Policia do Exército,　onde foi visto pela última vez. A família há 41 anos busca informação e não tem. O Exército não tem a obrigação de dar informação?

ROCHA PAIVA: Como já falei, a presidente da República, comandante suprema das Forças Armadas, tem autoridade para abrir uma investigação. Ressalvada a Lei da Anistia, ela tem autoridade para abrir uma investigação.　Por que ela não faz? Não sei. Não precisa uma comissão da verdade, que só vai investigar um lado, para isso. Veja bem: é emblemático o caso Rubens Paiva. Por que? O homem foi deputado, das classes favorecidas e todos se preocupam com ele e com Stuart Angel, também. Agora, por que os crimes do PC do B no Araguaia, crime como por exemplo o da perseguição e morte de　mateiros, que eram guias das forças legais. Teve um que foi 　torturado e assassinado na frente da mãe e do pai. Eles cortaram a orelha do rapaz na frente da mãe. O menino　urrava de dor, a mãe desmaiou.

Os guerrilheiros do Araguaia foram quase todos mortos, exceto um ou outro.

ROCHA PAIVA: Nem todos. E quem os comandava, que estava em São Paulo a dois mil quilômetros de distância, no bem-bom? 　Não vamos saber quem foram? Quem deu a ordem pra matar esse rapaz? Por que isso não é emblemático? 　Porque ele era um zé-ninguém. Por que também　não se apura quem deu ordem no PC do B para que as mulheres da guerrilha que engravidassem tivessem que abortar na região. Eles deram essa ordem.

O senhor sabe de torturas dentro do Exército? Chegou a ver?

ROCHA PAIVA: Não...eu não vi tortura dentro do Exército.

O senhor nunca soube de tortura dentro do Exército?

ROCHA PAIVA: Ah, para saber basta a senhora ir às livrarias, comprar uns livros, a senhora vai ver um rol 　de casos de tortura.

O senhor não acha que isso é um desvio?

ROCHA PAIVA: Isso é um desvio, ninguém está dizendo que não é um desvio. Agora, não foi anistiado? Não é desvio também aqueles grupos armados revolucionários da esquerda, que seguiam linha maoísta, linha soviética, linha cubana, que queriam implantar aqui uma ditadura nos moldes das soviética, chinesa e cubana, que são as responsáveis pelos maiores crimes contra a Humanidade no século passado? Então, esses grupos que queriam se tornar Estado, usavam de atentados terroristas e tortura, com que moral esse grupo condena as violações no outro grupo?

O senhor acha então que está justificada a tortura dentro da instalação militar...

ROCHA PAIVA: Não. Eu não estou dizendo que está justificado. Estou mostrando o seguinte: que existiu uma luta, que foram cometidos desvios pelos dois lados, só que houve uma anistia.

Um lado foi punido. A presidente Dilma Rousseff ficou presa três anos e foi submetida a tortura.

ROCHA PAIVA: Sim, ela diz que foi submetida a torturas. A senhora tem certeza?

Ah, eu acredito nela...

ROCHA PAIVA: ah, e eu não sei. A senhora quer ver uma coisa? Veja bem.: quero um exemplo histórico de uma guerrilha revolucionária marxista, leninista, maoísta que não tenha usado violência, atentados terroristas e violado direitos humanos. Eu quero que me mostre um caso histórico de uma reação a essa esquerda revolucionária que tenha tido um desfecho tão pouco traumático como no Brasil. Porque na realidade, no Brasil, o governo e a oposição legal queriam a redemocratização do país. Então, no governo e na Arena era a redemocratização gradual e segura.

Demorou 25 anos...

ROCHA PAIVA: Exato. Dez anos de atraso. Dez anos de atraso, por causa da luta armada.

O senhor acha que a sua opinião é compartilhada pelos que estão na ativa?

ROCHA PAIVA: A opinião? Qual opinião? Eu não estou justificando a tortura. Tortura é crime como o terrorismo é crime. Sou contra endeusar terrorista, sequestrador porque estavam combatendo pela liberdade, porque não estavam. E satanizar o torturador. O torturador é um criminoso que vê a pessoa a quem ele está fazendo mal e ele causa mal a essa pessoa que é inimiga dele, em seus ideais. O terrorista bota bomba no cinema, no saguão do aeroporto e mata mulheres, crianças e até mulheres grávidas.

Como a bomba do Riocentro que foi levada pelo Exército?

ROCHA PAIVA: A bomba do Riocentro, o caso foi reaberto em 1999 em pleno regime democrático de direito. Foram apontados cinco responsáveis. O Juiz mandou arquivar por falta de provas.

Explodiu no colo do sargento, general

ROCHA PAIVA: Quem é que pode dizer o que aconteceu?

Todos os indícios. O senhor acha então que o Capitão Wilson, o sargento não estavam levando a bomba?

ROCHA PAIVA: O processo foi arquivado por falta de provas. A senhora acha que foram eles?

Sim, claro!

ROCHA PAIVA: Eu não tenho provas.

O senhor acha que essa sua opinião, essas suas opiniões, por exemplo contra a comissão da Verdade, são compartilhadas por pessoas que estão na ativa?

ROCHA PAIVA: Olha, eu não tenho dúvida de que é geral. Agora, a gente tem que ver o seguinte: o que um militar na ativa pode falar? Ele não pode falar contra o governo. Agora, digo para a senhora o seguinte: chefes　militares cultuam hierarquia, disciplina e também justiça. Ante a iminência de uma injustiça que vai ser perpetrada contra seus subordinados, ele tem obrigação moral e funcional de - com franqueza, disciplina, sem　alarde e dentro da lei - levar a sua posição a seus comandantes superiores. Se eles não fizerem isso, eles não são dignos de serem chefes. E o que está na iminência de acontecer? Com a comissão da Verdade, aqueles　agentes do Estado, tenham ou não torturado - porque o que a Comissão da Verdade quer é expor a cara de todo mundo que tenha participado dos órgãos de inteligência, de informação; eles querem expor todo mundo -　então, tenham ou não torturado. vai ser execrado. Eles têm obrigação moral de...esse pessoal entrou ali, muita gente combateu por ideal e se sacrificou. Se alguns cometeram deslizes, foram anistiados, assim　como foram anistiados os terroristas, sequestradores e assassinos.

O que o senhor acha que os comandantes militares têm que fazer a respeito?

ROCHA PAIVA: Eles não têm que sair pra imprensa pra falar nada. O que acho que eles estão fazendo - eu não posso dizer, estou dizendo pela formação que eu tive - eles estão levando essa preocupação à presidente da　República. Porque eu acho que o homem livre é escravo da sua consciência e a consciência é juíza perene de sua vida. Ele não é escravo de cargos e posições. Ele arrisca cargos e posições por aquilo　que ele acredita que é seu ideal. Dentro da lei.

Dentro de uma instituição tão respeitável quanto o Exército Brasileiro houve tortura. Há várias provas. E o senhor mesmo disse que é desvio. Se é desvio, o Exército não deveria ser o primeiro a querer que fossem punidos para que tudo aquilo ficasse em pratos limpos?

ROCHA PAIVA: Olha, o que passou e foi anistiado não pode ser retocado. Veja bem: anistia não é um instrumento jurídico. É um instrumento político. No Brasil, a sociedade apoiou o　governo no combate à luta armada. Anistia não foi para reconciliar a nação. A nação estava do lado do governo senão nós teríamos hoje talvez umas Farc aqui, ou um Sendero Luminoso. Para que veio a anistia? Veio para neutralizar radicas à esquerda e à direita, que poderiam prejudicar a redemocratização.

General, anistia estabelece que não pode haver punição. Mas ela não impede que se busque a informação. E não é isso que a Comissão da Verdade está fazendo?

ROCHA PAIVA: Nunca no Brasil, na História do Brasil, se precisou de Comissão da Verdade para saber o que aconteceu na ditadura Vargas. Historiadores fazem isso. Se quiser investigar crimes que tenham ocorrido,　independente de anistia, faz-se uma investigação policial. A presidente chama　a Policia Federal, o Ministério Público, quem quer que seja, e manda investigar.

Toda a vez que se pede aos comandantes militares documentos, eles dizem que os documentos foram destruídos. E aí será que não tem documentos?

ROCHA PAIVA: Agora, vamos ver o seguinte: existem normas de controle de documentos. sigilosos. Então, você pega e tem um inquérito. Os presos ficavam em organizações de Doi-Codi. Não eram tanto dentro de quarteis. Alguns ficavam dentro de quarteis. Eu mesmo quando cheguei a aspirante tinha preso no quartel que eu cheguei. Era preso normal. Levava a vida dele normal.

Levavam a vida normal não, estavam presos.

ROCHA PAIVA: Sim, vida de preso normal....

A Comissão quer buscar informação. Não é importante buscar a informação?

ROCHA PAIVA: Ah, sim. A senhora falou dos documentos. O que acontece? Faz-se um inquérito no quartel. Terminado aquele inquérito, ele vai para o STM. Chegando no STM, aquele inquérito está lá　arquivado. No quartel, fica uma cópia. Essa cópia, a partir de determinado momento, é destruída. E esses inquéritos foram feios até 1979. Nenhum documento confidencial passa de ...naquele tempo eram dez anos.

Então, como saber o que aconteceu com Rubens Paiva, por exemplo?

ROCHA PAIVA: Se foi feito algum documento...

Ele morreu dentro de um estabelecimento militar. Ninguém tem registro?

ROCHA PAIVA: A senhora está dizendo, que ele morreu dentro de um estabelecimento militar. Eu não sei. A senhora tem certeza?

Ele foi visto lá pela última vez.

ROCHA PAIVA: Foi visto. Não estou dizendo que é o caso dele, mas tem gente que hoje em dia é considerado desaparecido, porque estava na luta armada, queria sair da luta armada, estava preso, recebeu documentação e mudou de vida. Então, alguns desaparecidos não querem nem aparecer. Um apareceu, que estava lá na Noruega, quando soube que ia receber dinheiro. Era um desaparecido que apareceu. Dona Miriam, veja bem...

No caso do Rubens Paiva, foi aberto um IPM para tentar descobrir que foi que aconteceu. Foi em 1986, mas ele foi arquivado sem que houvesse uma investigação séria. Portanto, o caminho de se fazer apenas a investigação às vezes não dá certo. Não é melhor criar uma comissão, como outros países fizeram?

ROCHA PAIVA: Os outros países fizeram comissões da verdade dentro de outros quadros. Veja bem: a 　comissão da verdade emblemática é a da África do Sul, certo? Ela é feita antes de conceder a anistia. E pra receber a　anistia, tinha que passar na comissão. E eram anistiados os dois lados., que confessassem seus crimes e relacionassem seus crimes a motivações políticas. Os dois　lados foram anistiados. O Pacto de Moncloa, na Espanha, também anistiou os dois lados. Eu não vejo necessidade, depois de 30 anos, é só investigação policial. Porque chamar lá alguém pra ser ouvido: Ainda mais, veja bem: se eu sou um ex-agente do Estado e sou chamado na comissão da verdade, sabendo que alguém pode mover uma ação civil indenizatória contra a minha pessoa, estando eu anistiado, eu vou chegar lá e vou dizer que não sei de nada. Eu vou falar por quê? Qual a motivação que eu tenho? Se eu abrir a minha boca, vou ser penalizado. Depois de 30 anos? Então isso não tem explicação...

O senhor acha justo que os torturadores não sejam conhecidos, não sejam punidos, sequer se informe sobre os crimes que eles praticaram ou que tenham que dar explicação sobre pessoas que　desapareceram quando estavam sob a custódia do Estado?

ROCHA PAIVA: Faça-se uma investigação, e não comissão da verdade. Eu não vejo porque eles têm que aparecer agora, porque eles estão anistiados. Por que não tem que aparecer também quem sequestrou, quem　planejou? Se uma autoridade, hoje, tiver participado; até a presidente Dilma,tiver participado, seja diretamente ou indiretamente, que aí é co-responsável, de um crime que tenha deixado sequelas com　vítimas, vai haver a comissão da verdade? A presidente vai aparecer? 　É isso que a senhora quer depois de 30 anos?

O senhor não acha que o país tem que olhar para esse passado?

ROCHA PAIVA: Então vamos olhar para os dois lados do passado. Se a presidente, se o senhor Franklin Martins e gente que a gente não sabe que participou do planejamento. Da execução, a gente já sabe, mas do　planejamento e do apoio não. Quem é que participou dos comitês dos julgamentos que resultaram no justiçamento, assassinato dos próprios companheiros, quem participou? Por que eu não posso saber? Eu só vou ter que saber quem for agente do Estado? Eu não acho isso justo...

General, os senhores tiveram 25 anos de poder. Eles eram seus inimigos. Se vocês não têm a informação, é porque a informação não existe. Ou vocês não foram capazes de apurar.

ROCHA PAIVA: A informação pode ser, a senhora não quer que apure? Então, eu quero que apure o outro lado também. A senhora está sendo maniqueísta, a senhora está sendo facciosa já que vai haver a comissão da verdade, veja bem - eu sou contra a existência - mas agora que vai haver que investigue os dois lados. Quem eram os terroristas mataram no Araguaia?

E quem matou as pessoas, os guerrilheiros que estavam no Araguaia?

ROCHA PAIVA: Vamos botar na comissão da verdade todos. Os dois lados. A senhora está insistindo que se faça um lado. Estou dizendo: vamos os dois. A senhora está sendo facciosa, eu não. Eu estou dizendo que eu　quero os dois lados. A senhora está dizendo que é um só.

Os militares assumiram o poder e usaram o Estado contra as pessoas. Ninguém jamais foi preso, ninguém jamais foi condenado, o Exército　nunca reconheceu quem torturou. O senhor não acha que quando se faz isso não pode ficar claro o conluio do Exército com torturadores?

ROCHA PAIVA: Quem é que vai afirmar quem torturou? Outra coisa: a senhora falou que o Exército atuava contra as pessoas. Não. O Estado, e não era só o Exército, o Estado, seus órgãos policiais atuaram, não 　foi contra　pessoas, tanto que a população apoiou quem? O governo. A população não apoiou a luta armada. Eles viviam homiziados, escondidos, porque, se aparecessem na rua, às vezes, eram denunciados. Tinham que estar todos camuflados, escondidos. Por que? Porque a população apoiou, apoiou fortemente o Estado contra a luta armada. A senhora fala em ditadura, tortura, me diga uma　democracia, um organismo internacional que tenha reconhecido qualquer grupo da luta armada como　estando defendendo a liberdade, ou representando parte do povo brasileiro. Não tem. Eu fui observador militar da ONU em El Salvador e a FMLN foi reconhecida; os representantes dos vietcongs, nas conversações em Paris, existiam. E era uma luta armada. Agora, no Brasil, não houve nenhum　grupo. A senhora fala em ditadura, eu falo em regime autoritário. Regime autoritário, Hannah Arendt diferenciou bem de regime totalitário. Regime autoritário limita a liberdade individual, limita a liberdade de expressão, limita a liberdade política. Mas no Brasil nós tínhamos Grupo Opinião de Teatro, tínhamos peças teatrais que condenavam a ditadura, tínhamos músicas de protesto, tínhamos festivais da canção, tínhamos o Pasquim, tinhamos o Febeapá.

No Pasquim todo mundo foi preso!

ROCHA PAIVA: É o que digo, limitada a liberdade. Não deixaram de existir. O Pasquim deixou de existir depois do regime militar. Então, eles existiam. As livrarias vendiam livros de Marx, Engels, Lênin, Trotsky. Que ditadura totalitária é essa? Existia uma oposição que disputava eleição, ganhava e perdia eleição, que tinha espaço nos jornais. Eu via Ulysses Guimarães sempre falando e criticando. Que ditadura totalitária é essa?

Então, o senhor concorda com os 25 anos de regime militar...

ROCHA PAIVA: Eu concordo com os 25 anos, sem dúvida! Podia ser talvez menos um pouco.

O senhor começou a sua carreira exatamente no ano em que aumentou a repressão.

ROCHA PAIVA: Aumentou a luta armada! Aumentou a luta armada. A repressão é consequência da luta armada.

Com o AI-5, o regime se aprofundou e aumentou, portanto, os casos de desaparecidos e os casos de mortos, o caso Rubens Paiva, por exemplo, acontece em 71. O senhor fez a carreira nessa época, nunca ouviu sequer falar que havia tortura dentro dos...

ROCHA PAIVA: Miriam, sempre se falou. Agora, me diz uma coisa: quando é que não houve tortura no Brasil? Houve tortura em Getúlio? Houve. Houve tortura no tempo da democracia? Houve. Houve tortura no regime militar? Houve. Está havendo tortura agora? Está. O Brasil é condenado na ONU, ou é acusado na ONU, por violação de direitos humanos por agentes do Estado, do Estado democrático de direito. A senhora quer fazer um　cálculo comigo? A senhora pega o livro "Brasil, nunca mais". Arquidiocese de São Paulo. Insuspeita. Arquidiocese de São Paulo, dom Paulo Evaristo Arns. Fizeram pesquisas nos arquivos do STM. Levantaram, antes de　1995, portanto antes da lei de indenização Bolsa-ditadura. Levantaram 1.918 torturados. Se a senhora dividir isso por dez anos, e eu só estou considerando o tempo da luta armada, porque se for　20 anos é muito menos. Dez anos de luta armada, doze meses no ano e trinta dias, a senhora vai ter menos de um torturado por dia. Aí, a senhora vai para depois de 1995, o livro do Chievenatto, em 2004, aí já tinha saído a Bolsa-ditadura. Portanto, todo mundo que entrou em Doi-Codi, tá certo?, Até pra prestar um depoimento, por ser testemunha está dizendo que foi torturado. Aí esse número de 1918, depois que sai o Bolsa-ditadura, sobe pra 20 mil torturados. Se a senhora fizer essa mesma conta que eu fiz, a senhora vai chegar a seis torturados por dia. Então uma média de meio torturado por dia, se é que se pode se dizer assim, e seis. A senhora vai ter em torno de quatro torturados por dia por conta da luta armada. Miriam, se nós formos, agora, em qualquer presídio nesse Brasil inteiro, vamos encontrar muito mais gente sendo torturada agora. Por que ninguém se sensibiliza com isso? Sabe por quê? Por que quem está sendo preso agora, está sendo torturado não defende ideia marxista-leninista, não é da classe média, não é filho de deputado, não é artista. A esquerda radical, revanchista, hipócrita e incoerente se solidariza com esse pessoal do outro tempo. E olham que eram quatro por dia, no máximo, tá certo? Eu não estou tirando a hediondez do crime! Eu estou mostrando que isso está acontecendo agora, e ninguém se incomoda. Esses que estão sendo agora torturados, não vão ser indenizados, como foram aqueles que foram presos no tempo do regime militar. Então, isso é injustiça.

O senhor não acha que é mais inteligente da parte das Forças Armadas admitirem que houve o erro? Até para preservar o nome da instituição, dizer que a instituição, como um todo não concordava com os　desvios que aconteceram no Doi-Codi, na Polícia do Exército, em todos esses aparelhos de tortura instalados dentro das organizações ?

ROCHA PAIVA: Eu não vejo por 　que pedir perdão, se não houve nenhuma cisão social remanescente do regime militar. Quando saiu o regime militar, que começaram a fazer pesquisas, as Forças Armadas já estavam no topo das instituições de maior credibilidade do país, acima até da imprensa. Então, por que essa instituição precisa pedir perdão?

Porque é crime general, porque é crime.

ROCHA PAIVA: Não, não. Foi anistiado, foi anistiado, eu insisto nisso. Foi anistiado, então parou aí. Vamos investigar o que aconteceu? Vamos. Mas está anistiado. Não tem que pedir perdão coisa nenhuma. É interessante a hipocrisia da nossa sociedade. Bate palma e aplaude o "Tropa de Elite". Eu acho hipócrita. Eu faço a pergunta assim, de chofre: se um filho seu ou um neto seu for sequestrado, e a policia botar a mão no sequestrador que sabe onde está o esconderijo dele e aí? ... A senhora demorou a responder.

Estou esperando até onde o senhor vai ...

ROCHA PAIVA: A senhora demorou a responder. Então o que eu digo é hipocrisia.

Não estou aqui para responder. Estou para fazer perguntas. Eu pergunto, o senhor responde.

ROCHA PAIVA: Não é um programa de debate?

Não. Eu não estou debatendo com o senhor. Estou apresentando questões que são colocadas por pessoas que discordam do senhor...

ROCHA PAIVA: Eu estou respondendo. Eu estou, num programa de entrevistas, fazendo uma pergunta. Não pode? Não pode?

Estou querendo saber sobre o Exército. Se não é melhor ele admitir que houve desvio, houve tortura. E, portanto, ele não torturará mais...

ROCHA PAIVA: Ô, Miriam...Vai na livraria, você, lógico que já leu...Dezenas de livros que contam sobre tortura. Precisa admitir? Precisa admitir? Tá lá escrito. Quem quiser, que acredite. Quem não quiser, não acredite. Certo? Então. Tá escrito. Não precisa admitir. A sociedade cobraria das Forças Armadas, se ela não tivesse colocada as Forças Armadas no topo das instituições de credibilidade. Então, se houve violações naquele momento, a sociedade já perdoou. Se não ela não estaria lá no topo das instituições de credibilidade, acima até da imprensa...

Eu acho que agora é um outro Exército...

ROCHA PAIVA: Não. É o mesmo.

É o mesmo Exército que torturou?

ROCHA PAIVA: A senhora que está falando em tortura. Eu estou dizendo o seguinte: Quem evoluiu, foi o país. E o Exército evoluiu junto do país. Todos os presidentes militares falavam de redemocratização e admitiram　que era um Estado de exceção. Eu listo para a senhora 16 crises político-militares envolvendo militar, partido político, o Exército dividido. De 22 a 64, existem 16 crises militares. Aí vem 1964, revolução de 31 de março. Luta armada. Dez anos depois, redemocratização 　e abertura. Me diga uma crise político-militar que teve no país depois disso. Por que? Porque a Revolução se　encarregou de separar o militar da política, por isso automaticamente reforçou as instituições do país, os poderes nacionais e nunca mais houve uma crise político-militar no país. Então, um dos grandes feitos do regime　militar foi afastar as Forças Armadas da política e isso é uma das causas da nossa democracia estar estável hoje.

Eu queria que o senhor fizesse uma reflexão sobre o fato de que, nos outros países, houve punição, prisão de torturador e até responsabilidade de comandantes, como, por exemplo, o general Videla, que foi presidente da Argentina, ou Pinochet, que foi presidente do Chile. Eu queria que o senhor falasse sobre isso. Por que eles usaram esse caminho e nós, não?

ROCHA PAIVA: Primeiramente, nos três países, tanto Argentina, Uruguai e Chile, eles cometeram uma falha. A anistia lá não foi ampla, geral e irrestrita. A anistia lá foi para os agentes do Estado. Então, com isso, a anistia se esvaziou. Só que no Uruguai fizeram um referendo e o povo uruguaio foi a favor da manutenção da anistia. Na Argentina e no Chile, a luta armada foi muito mais violenta que no país, do que no Brasil. Então, são condições diferentes, são países diferentes. São países com a veia espanhola muito radical e muito açodada e são condições diferentes do país. Cada país escolhe o seu caminho.

O que o senhor acha da Operação Condor que unia os países do Cone Sul, inclusive o Brasil, em troca de prisioneiros, em troca de informação, em troca de técnicas de tortura? E também o que acha da operação Oban,　que uniu líderes empresariais com as Forças Armadas?

ROCHA PAIVA: A senhora está falando em convênio de países para enfrentar problemas comuns? Tinha um convênio entre os países da cortina de ferro para enfrentar problemas comuns. Os　Estados Unidos têm a Otan. Hoje, os Estados Unidos têm convênios com vários países para a questão do terrorismo. Os grupos de esquerda armados, revolucionários, tinham ligações internacionais também; então, é mais que natural, essas ligações internacionais para troca de informações, certo? Para trocar informações operacionais e também da parte doutrinária.

O senhor acha que a Operação Condor foi apenas um acordo entre os países? O senhor acha normal?

ROCHA PAIVA: Ah, sim, isso existe hoje, isso existe hoje. Nós temos reuniões bilaterais de inteligência, de doutrina. E não é só reunião bilateral no campo militar, não. Tem relação bilateral no campo da indústria, do comércio, certo? Isso é normal entre os países. E eles enfrentaram problemas comuns. Os grupos armados de esquerda no Brasil, eles também tinham ligações internacionais, só que isso aí ninguém fala.

E a Oban?

ROCHA PAIVA: A Oban eu não tenho conhecimento. Eu sei que...Eu não sei nem em que ano começou. Sinceramente,se eu soubesse eu diria.

O Vladimir Herzog era diretor de uma emissora, não era guerrilheiro. Ele foi se apresentar para depor e morreu.

ROCHA PAIVA: E quem disse que ele foi morto pelos agentes do Estado? Isso há controvérsias. Há uma controvérsia quando a isso aí. Quem disse que ele foi morto pelos agentes do Estado? Ninguém pode afirmar.　

ROCHA PAIVA: Se não foram os militares que mataram Vladimir Herzog, por que os militares que estavam lá naquele momento não aparecem na comissão da Verdade?

ROCHA PAIVA: Existe um inquérito e está escrito no inquérito. Chame os oficiais que estão ali. Se é que tinha algum oficial, se não era gente da Policia Federal, da Policia Militar ou da Policia Civil. Chame a pessoa e consulte. Agora, chame também quem pode ter mandado matar ou quem pode ter dado a ordem para assassinar o capitão Chandler, assassinado na frente do seu filho. Chegaram na cabeça dele e deram mais de vinte tiros na cabeça dele. Isso na frente do filho dele. Quem fez, a gente sabe. Mas quem planejou e apoiou. A gente não sabe, precisa saber. Foi a ALN. Quem era da ALN? O nosso senador Aloysio. O senador que foi relator da Comissão da Verdade, do projeto de lei. Aloysio Nunes Ferreira. Ele era da ALN. Será que ele não tem alguma coisa? Vamos chamar o senador na Comissão da Verdade? Sim. Por que não? Vamos chamar a presidente Dilma? Ela era da VAR-Palmares. E a VAR-Palmares foi a que lançou o carro-bomba que matou o soldado Mario Kozel Filho. Ela era da parte de apoio. Será que ela participou do apoio a essa operação? A comissão da Verdade não vai chamá-la, por quê? Entende? Minha posição é essa.

SLAVERY TODAY AND THE BATTLE OVER HISTORY

SLAVERY TODAY AND THE BATTLE OVER HISTORY

When I was invited to lecture on: “Slavery – The Rest of the Story” at three university campuses in Minnesota, I expected that it would engender some opposition. What I could not have foreseen was the intensity of hostility and emotion that would be whipped up by some radical students against myself and those who had invited me.

Karl Marx declared: “The first battlefield is the rewriting of history.” Evidently, many of Marx’s disciples have been very busy on the university campuses rewriting history, rearranging reality and brainwashing students.

The University of Minnesota has 37,000 students, including over 2,900 international students from more than 130 countries, including China, India, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and many others.

I have been invited to lecture at the university campus before, on the persecution of Christians in Sudan. Those presentations received some opposition, but nothing like what we received on this occasion.

Muslim students from Somalia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia expressed great hostility, anger and emotion in opposition to my presentations on Slavery – The Rest of the Story . At one of the lunch time presentations in a university auditorium, the questions and answers and discussion went on for over 3-and-a-half hours after the end of the presentation. One Somalian stood up and made a long and vitriolic speech against “President Bush’s war of aggression against the people of Iraq,” and attacked me for not dealing with this. In response I pointed out that I was not an American citizen, that I had never worked in Iraq, that I am an African, and the subject that I had been invited to speak on was: “Slavery – The Rest of the Story.” I had spoken on what I had personally witnessed and researched in Sudan, but I could not speak with any authority on Iraq, as I had never even visited that country.

However, I did point out that I was not aware that America was waging “a war of aggression against the Iraqi people.” It was my impression that the Allied forces had freed the people of Iraq from one of the most brutal dictatorships in the Middle East. In fact, I asked, didn’t Iraq now have the first elected government in its history? So, perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to the conflict in Iraq as a civil war where the US forces are assisting the first elected government in Iraq’s history against local insurgents?

A woman, who identified herself as coming from Saudi Arabia, was most agitated. She declared that it was false to give the impression that women were oppressed in Islam. Women were “completely free and equal.” It was wrong to suggest that Muhammad had owned slaves, she claimed, he never mistreated anybody, and Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion of brotherhood.

I had to remind this lady that both the Quran and the Hadith confirm that Muhammad was a slave owner and a slave trader. Muhammad gave detailed instructions concerning the treatment of slaves, including that Muslim slave masters could lawfully “enjoy” their female slaves sexually or even hire them out as prostitutes. “How many women can a Muslim man marry?” I asked. “Four” she replied. “And how many men can a Muslim woman marry?” “What’s that got to do with it?” She responded angrily. I pointed out that this indicates that there is no equality for women in Islam.

“Are you, as a Muslim woman, allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia?” “Of course not!” she responded angrily. “Can you, as a Muslim woman, drive a car in Saudi Arabia?”“No, but Saudi Arabia is the land of Muhammad!”“But you can drive a car here in America? Why is it that you have so many more rights and freedoms in America than you would have in your home country of Saudi Arabia?” In response, this woman expressed very hostile views of America and its government, prompting me to ask why she had come to study in such a horrible country, under such terrible conditions, when she could be enjoying such perfect freedom back in Saudi Arabia?

One student, apparently from Pakistan, declared that I did not deserve to live, and I should not be allowed to remain on this planet! When I asked where he would suggest I go, he exploded: “To hell!” In response to this I said: “I’m sorry, but the Lord Jesus has already dealt with that, so I will not be able to join you.”

One of the most surprising aspects of my visit to the university campuses in Minnesota was the hostility of many university lecturers against Christianity and America. As a missionary who has spent almost 25 years ministering to restricted access areas in Africa, I expect opposition from Muslims and Marxists. However, as experienced during these campus outreaches in Minnesota, some of the most fervent opposition we received came from nominal Christians who seem either infatuated with, or in fear of, Islam. They seemed most antagonistic towards Biblical Christianity and even hostile to the Christian civilisation, which they benefit from.

One university professor stood up during the question and answer time and declared that he was most disappointed with my presentation. It was “the most bigoted, narrow-minded lecture” he had ever heard in his life. He had brought his students from his history class to hear me, expecting that I would speak about the American involvement in the slave trade. He didn’t understand why I would have dealt with such “hurtful” and “offensive” material as the Muslim involvement in the slave trade. Why hadn’t I given more time and attention to America’s involvement?

To this I had to respond that surely the advertised title of my presentations: Slavery – The Rest of the Story should have made it abundantly clear that it was not my purpose to come to America to repeat again what most Americans are so familiar with, and what ended over 150 yeas ago. As an African missionary, who had witnessed the ongoing slave trade in Sudan today, I had undertaken a research project into the history of slavery in Africa and the result was the book: Slavery, Terrorism and Islam – The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat – on which these lectures had been based.

The American involvement in the slave trade lasted for less than 3 centuries; however, the Muslim involvement in the slave trade has continued for 14 centuries and is still continuing to this day. Considering that 95% of the African slaves who were transported across the Atlantic went to South and Central America, mainly to Portuguese, Spanish and French possessions, and that less than 5% of the slaves who crossed the Atlantic went to the United States, it was remarkable that the vast majority of academic research, films, books and articles concerning the slave trade concentrated only on the American involvement, as though slavery was a uniquely American aberration. The vastly great involvement of Portugal, Spain and France seems to be largely ignored. Even more so the far greater and longer running Islamic slave trade into the Middle East has been so ignored as to make it one of history’s best-kept secrets.

Now, I pointed out, if I had concentrated on the American slave trade, that would have been ignorant, bigoted and prejudiced.

Numerous Sudanese university students stood up to confirm the truth of my presentations, that there was indeed slavery continuing in Sudan today. “It is a fact! No one can deny it! The facts and the documentation are there, for anyone to see. We ourselves have seen and experienced it. The Americans are very honest and admit their involvement in slavery over 150 years ago. Why can’t you Muslims be honest and admit what is going on in your own countries, and deal with it?” challenged one student from Sudan.

Another man from Mexico spoke up: “My ancestors were the Aztecs. We were the biggest slave traders, and the slaves were used for human sacrifice - to make the sun rise each day! Our Aztec priests ripped out the beating hearts from living slaves who were sacrificed in our temples. Men were enslaved and sacrificed like that. I don’t like it. I am not proud of it, but it is a fact. It is part of our history. We have to face up to it. And the slavery and human sacrifice in Mexico only stopped when Christianity came and brought it to an end. That is the fact of history. When are the Arabs going to face up to the facts of their own history, and to what is going on in many Muslim countries today? When are they going to rise up like the Christians to bring this slavery in their own countries to an end?”

The atmosphere in the university auditorium was electric, as various students and some lecturers took part in the very vigorous question and answer time, and debating, arguing and discussing these volatile topics.

At one of the university campus meetings, I was still surrounded by about 10 students, including some from Somalia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, 4 and a half hours after the beginning of the presentation. Suddenly I realised that all the discussion had stopped and everyone was silent. They were all listening to me. After hours of shouting and argument, it was an eerie experience as I related the parables of Christ, particularly of the two men who went up to the Temple to pray: the one was a religious leader, a Pharisee; and the other was a tax collector – a sinner. I related the contrast between these two men. The one self-righteous, convinced of his own goodness and moral superiority, and the other man humbled and repentant only crying out: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!” Then I asked them which of these two men were justified in God’s sight? Whose prayer did the Lord find acceptable? The Muslim students remained silent as one of the Christians responded: “The tax collector, because he was repentant.” This seemed to shock the Muslims as they would have thought that the religious leader, with his fasting, was the righteous one.

I also had the opportunity to share the Gospel in the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son and how God Himself provided the lamb. I pointed them to Jesus, who is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29). He died in our place, the Just for the unjust.

After all the heated emotions, anger and shouting, it was an extraordinary experience to be able to communicate calmly and clearly the Gospel presentation to these Muslims who had been so emotive and hostile for so many hours.

My respect was greatly increased for the campus ministries that have to work in such volatile and hostile environments on a daily basis. Campus ministries, such as Maranatha, are laying a foundation for righteousness for future generations. On a daily basis they are seeking to evangelise in dorm rooms, class rooms and offices throughout the university community. With guest speakers like myself, and through men’s and women’s Bible studies, prayer meetings, contact tables and outreaches, they are challenging the present politically correct propaganda of Humanism and the New Age Movement with the life changing power of the Gospel of Salvation and Jesus Christ alone.

My host, Rev. Bruce Harpel, who founded Maranatha Christian Fellowship over 25 years ago, explains: “In the classroom, students are indoctrinated to think that truth is relative, that there are no absolutes, and what is right and wrong are determined by the individual and society.”

“Drinking, drugs, sexual immorality, and lack of accountability lead some students to self destruction. The student usually exits college much more wounded and addicted to sin than when he/she entered. Many times students who were raised in Christian homes abandon their beliefs as they are challenged by opposing worldviews. When these students return to their respective towns, cities, and countries, this bondage to sin is transfused into the bloodstream of society. We see more white-collar crime, violence, sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, suicide, divorce, depression and despair in society than ever before. The University is truly a mission field and that is why we are here. To ignore campus ministry is to surrender the culture to the enemy .”

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” 2 Corinthians 3:17

Dr. Peter Hammond

March14

Study finds red-light cameras could actually cause more accidents

While traffic-light cameras are be touted as safety devices, a new study finds that they might actually cause more harm than they prevent. A recent study by the University of South Florida Public Health shows that traffic accidents at intersections with traffic-light cameras have actually increased.

According to the study, drivers are more likely to slam on their brakes when the traffic signal turns yellow at a camera-equipped intersection, resulting in a higher number of rear-end crashes. Moreover, the study found that the cameras have not decreased the number of deaths due to red-light running accidents. "The injury rate from red-light running crashes has dropped by a third in less than a decade, indicating red-light running crashes have been continually declining in Florida without the use of cameras."

And the findings are not just limited to the roads of Florida. Similar studies have been conducted in Virginia, North Carolina and Ontario and have come up with the same results — traffic-cameras increase the number of crashes but do not reduce the number of fatalities due to drivers running red-lights.

But with traffic-cameras fines contributing more and more to municipals' bottom lines, a sudden removal of the cameras doesn't seem likely.

Six US cities tamper with traffic cameras for profit

March27

Six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. The local governments in question have ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.

The cities in question include Union City, CA, Dallas and Lubbock, TX, Nashville and Chattanooga, TN, Springfield, MO, according to Motorists.org, which collected information from reports from around the country. This isn't the first time traffic cameras have been questioned as to their effectiveness in preventing accidents. In one case, the local government was forced to issue refunds by more than $1 million to motorists who were issued tickets for running red lights.

The report goes on to note these are just instances that have been identified, and there may be more out there, and urges visitors to send in their own findings.

Traffic Cameras for Profit

Posted on April 9, 2008

This is why I am skeptical of any “public safety” argument when it comes to red light cameras.

There is no evidence despite repeated studies that traffic cameras make intersections any safer, yet there is ample evidence to suggest that cities other motives for installing them.

Six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. The local governments in question have ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.

[From Six US cities tamper with traffic cameras for profit]

Cities Caught Illegally Tampering With Traffic Lights To Increase Revenue Of Red Light Cameras

from the this-again? dept

Just last month there was the latest in a rather long line of reports noting that red light cameras tend to increase the number of accidents because people slam on their brakes to stop in time, leading to rear-ending accidents. Time and time again studies have shown that if cities really wanted to make traffic crossings safer there's a very simple way to do so: increase the length of the yellow light and make sure there's a pause before the cross traffic light turns green (this is done in some places, but not in many others).

Tragically, it looks like some cities are doing the opposite! Jeff Nolan points out that six US cities have been caught decreasing the length of the yellow light below the legal limits in an effort to catch more drivers running red lights and increasing revenue. This is especially disgusting. These cities are actively putting more people in danger of serious injury or death solely for the sake of raising revenue -- while claiming all along that it's for safety purposes. Is it any surprise that one of the six cities is Dallas? Remember, just last month Dallas decided it wasn't going to install any more red light cameras because fewer tickets had hurt city revenue.

Dallas, Texas Cameras Bank on Short Yellow Times

The top money-producing red light cameras in Dallas, Texas use short yellow warning times.

A local news investigation has found that the city of Dallas, Texas depends upon short yellow timing to maximize red light camera profit. Of the ten cameras that issue the greatest number of tickets in the city, seven are located at intersections where the yellow duration is shorter than the bare minimum recommended by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), KDFW-TV found.

The city's second highest revenue producing camera, for example, is located at the intersection of Greenville Avenue and Mockingbird Lane. It issued 9407 tickets worth $705,525 between January 1 and August 31, 2007. At the intersections on Greenville Avenue leadding up to the camera intersection, however, yellows are at least 3.5 or 4.0 seconds in duration, but the ticket producing intersection's yellow stands at just 3.15 seconds. The yellow is .35 seconds shorter than TxDOT's recommended bare minimum.

"For 30 miles per hour, if your yellow time was less than three and a half, you would not be giving that driver enough time to react and brake and stop prior to getting to the intersection," TxDOT Dallas District office transportation engineer supervisor Chris Blain told KDFW.

A small change in signal timing can have a great effect on the number of tickets issued. About four out of every five red light camera citations are issued before even a second has elapsed after the light changed to red, according to a report by the California State Auditor. This suggests that most citations are issued to those surprised by a quick-changing signal light. Confidential documents obtained in a 2001 court trial proved that the city of San Diego, California and its red light camera vendor, now ACS, only installed red light cameras at intersections with high volumes and "Amber (yellow) phase less than 4 seconds."

Dallas likewise installed the cameras at locations with existing short yellow times. A total of twenty-one camera intersections in Dallas have yellow times below TxDOT's bare minimum recommended amount. The Texas Transportation Institute study also found that shorter yellows generate a 110 percent jump in the number of tickets, but at the cost of safety. Increasing the yellow one second above the recommended minimum cut crashes by 40 percent.

Since the Dallas intersection ticketing program launched last December, it has issued $13.5 million worth of automated citations from sixty camera locations. Beginning in September, however, Texas cities must split camera ticket profit with the state. To make up for lost revenue, Dallas plans to install forty more cameras. View KDFW's signal timing chart, a 44k PDF file.

Source: Investigation: Red Light Camera Red Alert (KDFW-TV (TX), 11/13/2007)

Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism

Public Interest, Spring, 2001 by Brian C. Anderson

OF the major political thinkers of his generation--including Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Michael Oakeshott, and Leo Strauss--Bertrand de Jouvenel suffers from relative neglect. During the 1950s and 1960s, the French philosopher and political economist enjoyed a considerable reputation in the English-speaking world. He lectured as a visiting professor at Yale and the University of California-Berkeley, and his books garnered serious reviews in prestigious journals. But by the time of his death in 1987, his star had dimmed. Read through a span of recent political-theory journals and you will rarely encounter his name.

The neglect is not surprising. Jouvenel's thought does not fit into the two categories that unfortunately came to dominate academic thinking on politics during the 1970s and continue to rule it today: the arid left-liberalism of analytic philosophers like Ronald Dworkin, which reduces political thought to abstract reflection on moral and legal principles, and the nihilist radicalism of post-structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault, which irresponsibly seeks to blow up the bourgeois world to clear the way for who knows what.

Jouvenel's work, published over five decades in a series of learned, beautifully written books and essays, is anything but abstract. It harkens back to an older style of political thought (as old as Aristotle, really, but arching over the centuries to include Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville) that brings together moral and political philosophy and painstaking historical and institutional analysis.

His work is also a model of political responsibility. The philosopher Pierre Manent places Jouvenel in the sober tradition of liberalisme triste--melancholy liberalism--whose great representative is Tocqueville and among whose recent exemplars I would include Irving Kristol and Manent himself. These anti-utopians fully acknowledge the basic decency and justness of liberal democratic civilization. But they are also aware of its profound weaknesses--the erosion of moral and spiritual life, the hollowing out of civil society, the growth of an overbearing state, and the "joyless quest for joy," as Leo Strauss once put it, of a society dedicated chiefly to commercial pursuits. The task of liberalisme triste is to illumine the tensions and possibilities of this liberal civilization, in the hope of advising citizens and statesmen how best to cultivate the goods and avoid or at least moderate the evils that attend it.

Thankfully, there are signs that Jouvenel is sparking renewed interest. Over the last half-decade, two publishers--Liberty Fund Press and Transaction Publishers--have made available again to English readers some of his most important work. It seems an ideal occasion, then, to reconsider Jouvenel's contribution to political thought.

A life in the age of extremes

Bertrand de Jouvenel was born in 1903 into an aristocratic French household swept up in the political and intellectual currents of the early twentieth century. His father, Baron Henri de Jouvenel, was a well-known Dreyfusard politician and newspaper editor, and his mother, Sarah Claire Boas, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, ran a trendy Parisian salon, so young Bertrand met many of the leading artists, writers, and politicians of the day. Through his mother, a passionate supporter of Czechoslovak independence, he gained his earliest political experience, working as private secretary to Eduard Benes, Czechoslovakia's first prime minister, when barely out of his teens.

Jouvenel was close to both of his parents, who divorced in 1912, but his relationship to his father was sorely tested during the early twenties. After divorcing Bertrand's mother, Henri had remarried the novelist and sexual provocateur Colette. In 1919, the 16-year-old Bertrand, strikingly handsome-"all sinews and lank," observes Colette biographer Judith Thurman- entered a scandalous affair with his stepmother, then in her late forties, who had seduced the bookish teenager. In October 1923, according to one version of events, Henri surprised Bertrand and Colette in bed, definitively ending a marriage that had already soured. A remorseful Bertrand "was horrified to see myself, or to believe myself, the cause of this drama," hut continued the affair for two more years. He later patched things up with his father, but Colette always haunted him. Even as an old man, happily married to his second wife Helene (he briefly married war correspondent Martha Gellhorn during the early 1930s), Jouvenel had difficulty spe aking of his forbidden romance without emotion.

Jouvenel's formal education was more conventional than his love life. Subsequent to studying at the Lycee Hoche in Versailles, he graduated from the Sorbonne, where he read in law and mathematics. He later took up a succession of short-term academic posts that culminated in an appointment to the prestigious Ecole Science Politique in 1975. He always regretted not having a steadier academic career, which would have given him the opportunity to mold a generation of students as Aron and Strauss did. As founder and director of the think tank SEDEIS (Societe d'Etudes et de Documentation Economiques Industrielles et Sociales), an institution with many connections both inside and outside the academy, he did have a huge impact on the education of French elites by familiarizing them, through regular seminars and publications, with Anglo-American economic ideas.

Jouvenel's political education owed less to the academy than to his extensive work as a journalist, specializing in international relations, from the late 1920s until the Second World War. As political scientists Marc Landy and Dennis Hale observe, "To a degree unparalleled by any other chronicler of the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s, even Orwell, de Jouvenel witnessed the key events and came to know the key individuals firsthand." Jouvenel interviewed at length Mussolini, Churchill, and, in a world-wide exclusive in 1935, Hitler. His journalistic activities brought him to various European hotspots, including Austria during the Anschluss and Czechoslovakia during the Nazi invasion. This hands-on experience, note Landy and Hale, gave Jouvenel a feel for the stuff of politics, its tragic contingencies and mundane complexities, its resistance to abstract categories and utopian schemes, its dangers and decencies.

Like many of his generation, Jouvenel found his way to support for liberal democracy only gradually. At the age of 23, he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Radical-Socialist candidate. For a while, disgusted by the decadence of the French Third Republic, he sought solace on the other political extreme, and in 1936 joined Francois Doriot's Parti Popular Francais, a right-wing populist--some would say quasifascist--party. He would leave the party two years later, however, because of Doriot's shameful support for the Munich Pact. His eyes now opened, Jouvenel signed up with the French Army intelligence to struggle against the rising Nazi menace. In 1942, following France's armistice with Germany, he worked for the French resistance, eventually fleeing to Switzerland with the Gestapo in pursuit. By now, he had become the full-fledged antitotalitarian liberal that he remained the rest of his life.

Jouvenel's flirtation with the radical right during the thirties came back to trouble him in the early 1980s, when the Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell falsely accused him of collaborating with the Nazis. Jouvenel sued for libel in 1983 and won. Raymond Aron, who had left his hospital bed against his doctor's wishes to testify on Jouvenel's behalf, dropped dead of a stroke immediately after telling the court that his longtime friend was "one of the two or three leading political thinkers of his generation"--and no collaborator.

In addition to his journalistic activities, Jouvenel published several books prior to the war, including, in 1928, L'economie dirigee (coining the term the French still use for economic planning), a 1933 study of the Great Depression in the United States, and three novels. After the war, he mostly abandoned journalism to concentrate on writing the treatises in political philosophy that won him widespread acclaim. Jouvenel's postwar works contain the three main themes of his mature thought: an effort to understand the hypertrophy of the modern state; a meditation on the common good in pluralistic modern societies; and an attempt to describe the dynamics of political life. Let us look at each in turn.

Beware the Minotaur

Jouvenel wrote his first major work of political philosophy, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth, from Swiss exile as World War II raged and Europe lay in ruins. Its basic aim, one which runs through all of Jouvenel's postwar writings, is to examine how the modern state became so dangerous to human liberty.

The long shadow of the totalitarian state darkens every page of On Power. National Socialism and communism, in their quest to revolutionize the bourgeois economic and political condition, had desolated entire nations. Never before had such state power been unleashed. But even in contemporary liberal democratic societies, the centralized state had grown to a disturbing size. Jouvenel's libertarian ideal--"the recognition, or the assumption, that there is in every man the same pride and dignity as had hitherto been assured and protected, but for the aristocracy only, by privileges"--found less and less breathing room in the collectivist modern world.

Jouvenel's labyrinthine book is a kind of pathology of modern politics. Jouvenel reviews Western history to determine exactly when centralized authority--Power, or the Minotaur, as he alternatively calls it--first extended its reach and what allowed it to do so. The Minotaur started to stir, he discovers, in the twelfth century; it grew "continuously" until the eighteenth and has exponentially increased in size since then.

Jouvenel blames Power's growth on several permanent features of centralized government (following Jouvenel, I will capitalize the "p" in power whenever referring to the state apparatus). First, the central governing authority naturally seeks dominance. After all, flawed human beings occupy the offices of Power, and they often want to lord over everybody else. "Is not the will to Power rooted deep in human nature?" Jouvenel asks. The desire for dominion is not the whole story of human nature, as Jouvenel would readily agree, but every truthful account of political life--from the Biblical narrative of David to George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia--recognizes its eternal existence.

The second explanation for the concentration of Power is political rivalry. For political communities to survive military challenge, their leaders must be able to act decisively and forcefully. Fail to match your rival's punch-his capacity swiftly to mobilize his citizenry and levy their wealth or develop deadly new technologies--and you could quickly find yourself out for the count. To keep pace with powerful Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, for example, the respective dynasties of England and France had to take more authority into their hands, increasing the number of men under arms and hiking taxes. More recently, during World War II, the allied democracies used propaganda and state direction of the economy--Power-boosting tools generally shunned by free societies--to resist the Nazi war machine. The competition for military supremacy feeds the Minotaur.

The medieval moment

These two explanations, true as far as they go, still do not explain why Power started to expand when it did nor why that expansion intensified dramatically after the seventeenth century. For that, Jouvenel shows, greater attention to the logic of Western history is necessary. On Power exemplifies what I think is one of the great virtues of Jouvenel's political thought: In order to expand our perspective on the events affecting us, it shifts our attention from the immediacy of the present, which can be blind, to the past and, as we will see, to the future. In this book, Jouvenel breaks with the popular Enlightenment story--"pure fantasy," he deems it--of monarchs "to whose exactions there are no bounds" and modern democratic governments "whose resources are proportionate to their authority." The true picture, we learn from history, is much more ambiguous.

Consider the Middle Ages. Far from crushing men with arbitrary force, the medieval king inhabited a spiritual, moral, and institutional world that kept him tightly bound. The divine law, as the Catholic Church taught it, limited the king's authority, indeed all human authority, from above. The king was God's servant, with a sacred duty to preserve God's created order. That hierarchical order, among other things, made the king not master of, but simply first among, nobles--each a rival authority with land and forces of his own. To get anything done the king had to go, hat in hand, to his fellow nobles to beg for men and funds, all the while making sure the Church did not disapprove too strongly. In turn, the common law, a human artifact written within the framework of the divine law and borrowing some of its luster, limited Power from below with innumerable precedents and customs. Jouvenel remarks, "The consecrated king of the Middle Ages was a Power as tied down and as little arbitrary as we can conceive." G od was sovereign, not men; there was no absolute or uncontrolled human authority.

Some might accuse the Catholic Jouvenel of romanticizing medieval life. I think this is to mistake his point. Of course, kings often rudely violated the law, as Jouvenel admits, and the medieval mindset failed to extend to every man and woman full recognition of the dignity that is their due. But the law wove a religious and customary web around Power that prevented it from completely breaking loose and becoming absolute. Recall, Jouvenel says, that the Catholic Church's sanctions "brought the Emperor Henry IV to fall on his knees before Gregory VII in the snow of Canossa." In such a universe, Power could expand only slowly.

This complex web began to unravel when European kings, keen to boost their authority, threw their lot in with the people to heat down the nobles who kept Power in check. The people looked to the kings to free them from the petty and sometimes not-so-petty oppressions of the aristocrats, whom the kings, in top Machiavellian form, had successfully encouraged to ditch their age-old responsibilities to the plebs. From this alliance between kings and the masses arose, beginning in the fifteenth century and lasting until the eighteenth, Europe's absolute monarchies. The absolute monarchs, driving the aristocracy into the ground, centralized and modernized Power and wielded resources far greater than medieval kings. The Protestant Reformation also helped tear apart the medieval web and amplify monarchical Power by giving reformed princes leeway to redefine the meaning of divine laws and to disregard custom; Catholic princes, to keep up, began to skirt the Church's rules themselves. The Minotaur grew.

Democracy on trial

But what really triggers Power's dramatic expansion, Jouvenel suggests, is the birth of the democratic age, which finishes off the dying medieval order. The political scientist Pierre Hassner, a keen reader of Jouvenel, has it exactly right: On Power "is a generalization of Alexis de Tocqueville's idea that the French Revolution, rather than breaking the absolutism of the state, further concentrated power in the hands of the state." Jouvenel sees democratic times extending Power's reach in at least three different, but related, ways.

First and most fundamental is the triumph in the eighteenth century of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the idea that "the people," not some divine source or ancient custom, make the final call on all matters of law and social organization. "The denial of a divine lawgiving and the establishment of a human lawgiving," warns Jouvenel, "are the most prodigious strides which a society can take towards a truly absolute Power." Outside of small communities, popular sovereignty, taken literally, is absurd. The people themselves cannot actually govern and pretty soon others--often a single other--rule in their name. And these new rulers find it easier than ever before to direct and mobilize society.

Popular sovereignty erodes the restraints on what political communities can imagine doing. If the law is solely an expression of the people's will, where would the limits on it come from? Anything becomes possible: the rounding up of political opponents, the bombing of civilians, laws condemning minorities or the unfit to extinction, the creation of genetic monstrosities or genetic supermen.

In addition, popular sovereignty encourages the notion that the state is a tool directly to secure the people's well-being. Power is accordingly burdened with a surfeit of new responsibilities, from running jobs programs and providing welfare, to redistributing wealth and regulating businesses, to funding scientific research and guaranteeing education to all citizens. Some of this is reasonable and salutary, no doubt, but taken together it increases the state's sway.

Popular sovereignty also brings mass conscription: Since everyone ostensibly has an equal stake in Power, everyone must defend it. Historian Hippolyte Tame put it well: Universal suffrage and mass conscription are like "twin brothers ... the one placing in the hands of every adult person a voting paper, the other putting on his back a soldier's knapsack." The Sun King Louis XIV, the most absolute of absolute monarchs, would have loved to institute conscription for his endless wars across seventeenth-century Europe, but he felt himself powerless to do it. It was the French Revolution that first militarized the masses and sent them forth across Europe's battlefields.

The second way in which the democratic age extended Power was through the unleashing of relativism. Popular sovereignty meant self-sovereignty, the right of each individual to decide his own right and wrong. This Protagorism, as Jouvenel terms it, in which man becomes the measure of all things, summons the Minotaur to quell the social disorder it inevitably unleashes. In a later work, he gravely writes, "To the entire extent to which progress develops hedonism and moral relativism, to which individual liberty is conceived as the right of man to obey his appetites, nothing but the strongest of powers can maintain society in being." The social theorist Michael Novak would later make the same point: "For a society without inner policemen ... there aren't enough policemen in the world to make men civil."

Jouvenel pointed out that relativism calls forth Power a second way. The loss of objective standards is existentially unbearable, opening "an aching void in the room of beliefs and principles." The secular religions of communism and National Socialism would draw nourishment from this crisis of meaning, building up Power to truly monstrous proportions. In Jouvenel's stark account, totalitarianism is born of the modern world's moral confusion.

Finally, Power grows in the democratic age because of the erosion of civil society. Democratic regimes base themselves on the individual, and individualism tends to hollow out or utterly destroy civil society. The modern state wages a relentless attack on the "social authorities"--in today's policy jargon, the mediating structures of families, churches, businesses, and other associations that stand between the state and the individual and that constitute extra-individual sources of authority and meaning. The attack can he blunt and brutal, as in the totalitarian regimes' total repression of civil society. Or it can take a softer form, as when the bureaucratic and inefficient welfare state takes over from families the responsibility for rearing children. In either case, though on very different scales, one finds state Power vastly increased and individual liberties menaced or obliterated. In a social field in which there are but two actors--Power and the individual--humans cannot flourish.

Jouvenel does not have much good to say about the liberal democratic West in On Power. He does suggest the possibility of sustaining the flickering light of political and human liberty by supporting moral and religious belief in a "higher code" that would restrain human willfulness, and by educating leaders and citizens to be vigilant of Power, like their medieval predecessors. But he views the separation-of-powers doctrine advocated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal constitutionalists as a weak reed against Power's tank-like advance. Since all modern constitutions base themselves on the people's will, they will not long deter Power's advance.

In fact, Jouvenel's argument in On Power risks becoming a kind of reverse Marxism, in which history ends not in bliss but in the concentration camp. The gigantic state is "the culmination of the history of the West," he observes in the book's grim closing paragraphs, implying that there is not a lot we can do about it. Thankfully, the evolution of the democracies in the years since Jouvenel wrote the book does not bear out its gloomiest warnings.

Despite its excessive pessimism, On Power stands as a permanent warning to the citizens and statesmen of liberal democratic regimes that their freedom is difficult to sustain, for reasons inseparable from the logic of their own principles. And in Jouvenel's ensuing work, most evocatively in Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good, he develops a more constructive political science, one which looks more positively upon liberal constitutionalism.

The upshot: The classical goods of complete harmony and thick community that the modern world has undermined--and there is no doubt that they are goods--are incompatible with other goods that we cannot imagine living without. Too many armchair communitarians, on the left and the right, simply fail to see this.

If Jouvenel rejects any return to Greece as destructive of our modern freedoms, however, he does not turn around and embrace the libertarianism that, say, Charles Murray serves up in What It Means to Be a Libertarian. In Murray's view, government should do next to nothing, refusing to make judgments about citizens' moral choices and giving the market and the institutions of civil society free reign, except when monopolists or thieves or murderers mess things up.

This thin understanding of the political, Jouvenel contends, is not an adequate governing philosophy for a modern liberal democracy. Indeed, to the extent that government, basing itself on the self-sovereignty of man, refuses to discriminate between moral and immoral choices, it surrenders to the relativism that already disturbs liberal societies. As On Power showed, such relativism beckons the state to restore the order it destroys and to fill the emptiness it creates in the soul.

For Jouvenel, the modern democratic state has a much richer moral task. It is to create the conditions that let "social friendship"--a common good compatible with the goods and freedoms of modernity--blossom. Jouvenel describes this modern common good as resting "in the strength of the social tie, the warmth of the friendship felt by one citizen for another and the assurance each has of predictability in another's conduct." To nurture this mutual trust is the essence of the art of politics.

Daniel J. Mahoney and David DesRosiers, in their illuminating introduction to the Liberty Fund edition of Sovereignty, correctly observe that the book "contains one of the richest accounts of the permanent requirements of statesmanship written in this century." Among the tasks of the liberal statesman are the following (this is by no means an exhaustive list): First, the statesman must prudentially balance innovation and conservation. Modern societies, severed from the past, are open, mobile, and constantly transforming. Government needs to respond to the constant flux with policies that attenuate some of its worst effects. For contrary to what "dynamists" like Reason magazine's Virginia Postrel think, human beings cannot live in a world that is always changing: Such a condition is profoundly alienating. Thus Jouvenel would be willing to use government funds to retrain workers displaced by a new technology.

One way of pursuing this balance is to anticipate future trends as much as possible in order to cushion their impact. Hence Jouvenel's extensive research in "future studies," given its fullest theoretical treatment in a fascinating but sadly out-of-print 1968 book, The Art of Conjecture (here again he shakes us from what I would call, if you can forgive the somewhat barbarous neologism, our presentism). The "art" in the title is a tip-off. In Jouvenel's view, there is no science of the future, only reasoned inferences from existing trends.

Next, the statesman must do nothing to harm and everything possible to help a culture of ordered liberty prosper short of imposing a state truth. As we have seen, the free society cannot survive if license prevails. At a minimum this means a statesman should be a model of self-restraint in his own life. (No Esquire crotch-shots or trysts with interns, in other words.) But one can imagine an array of policies-President George W. Bush is pursuing some of them right now--that would shore up, rather than weaken, ordered liberty without resorting to massive state coercion. Of course, the political leader cannot do this alone--not hardly. This is a task for all citizens of a free society, particularly those who participate in culture-forming institutions.

The statesman must also regulate "noxious activities" that threaten social friendship. Racists would get no license to march in a Jouvenelian liberal democracy. Parties that advocated revolution or violence would find no home there, either. Jouvenel believes civility is crucial to a free society.

And finally, the statesman must deflate hopes for a permanent solution to the political problem. There is no ultimate solution in politics, only temporary "settlements," as Jouvenel put it in a later book. To try to conjure up ancient Greece again or to dispense with politics almost all together (the communitarian and libertarian dreams, respectively) are both solutions, not settlements. Politics is our permanent this-worldly condition; to deny that fact is to create, or at least tempt, tyranny.

The good and bad of capitalism

Nowhere is there greater need for vigilance in cultivating the common good in modern democracies than with regard to the free market. To be sure, Jouvenel is a strong defender of the efficiency and productivity of a free economy. The capitalist dynamo has eased life for millions, giving them choices and opportunities and time unavailable to all but the few in premodern societies. Jouvenel knows that economic growth and consumer satisfaction are the imperatives that drive our societies.

But having more goodies does not constitute the good life. Quality of life is key to assessing a decent society. Like Pope John Paul II, Jouvenel argues that a strong moral culture and vigorous political institutions must serve as makeweights against the market. Thus Jouvenel would probably have had few qualms about cracking down on Hollywood violence and Calvin Klein kiddie-porn ads. For just as government has a responsibility to educate citizens politically, so too it is important to lift the preferences of consumers to higher ends. "We live in majority societies where beautiful things will be wiped out unless the majority appreciates them," Jouvenel pointedly observed during the sixties. A market society is praiseworthy only if the choices people make within it are praiseworthy.

Another area in which the market needs public oversight is the environment. In a highly organized modern society, Jouvenel wrote in the 1957 essay "From Political Economy to Political Ecology," "Nature disappears behind the mass of our fellow creatures." We forget what we owe it. I can imagine some conservative readers rushing to put Jouvenel back on the shelf at this point. But Jouvenel's green thumb is much closer to legal theorist Peter Huber's (or Theodore Roosevelt's) market-friendly conservationism than it is to Norwegian Arne Naess's antihumanist deep ecology.

The environment is for man, not man for the environment--that Biblical insight is one Jouvenel embraces. Promethean modern economies have made man master of the Earth, and that is potentially to the good, he says. But with mastery comes responsibility. In a 1968 essay entitled "The Stewardship of the Earth," Jouvenel sums up his environmental vision: "The Earth has been given to us for our utility and enjoyment, but also entrusted to our care, that we should be its caretakers and gardeners." This is sensible stuff. It means smart environmental regulations establishing wildlife reserves, cleaning up rivers, protecting endangered species, and punishing toxic dumpers, not trying to restore some pre-industrial arcadia (there is that anti-utopianism again).

If Jouvenel's support for the free market stops short of an idolatry of choice and the right to pollute, it enthusiastically resists government interventions aimed at redistributing wealth. "Only Hayek has rivaled Bertrand de Jouvenel in demonstrating why redistributionism in the democracies results in the atrophy of personal responsibility and the hypertrophy of the bureaucracy and the centralized state instead of in relief to the hapless minorities it is pledged to serve," enthuses the sociologist Robert Nisbet about a book Jouvenel first published in 1952, called The Ethics of Redistribution. In this short, profound study, Jouvenel ignores (though he agrees with it) the economic argument against the redistribution of wealth: that it eats away at incentives and so impoverishes everybody. Instead, he concentrates on the moral arguments against redistribution in an indictment of contemporary left-liberalism as damning as we have.

Jouvenel's three arguments remain unanswered. One is that redistribution quickly becomes regressive. Jouvenel shows that levying the wealth of the rich does not provide nearly enough economic resources to offer a subsistence minimum to the down and out. Instead, government must dip into the pockets of the middle class and even the lower middle class, who themselves receive income transfers. This insight, Jouvenel avers, upsets a widely held belief: "that our societies are extremely rich and that their wealth is merely maldistributed." Pursuing redistribution in the face of this truth, he adds, "involves the debasement of even the lower middle-class standard of life." Society becomes proletarianized.

The second argument against redistribution is that it corrodes personal responsibility. By providing for basic needs, the redistributionist state weakens the individual's independence and civil society's authority, threatening to make people into dependent drudges. This also reinforces the modern impulsion to centralization described in On Power.

Finally, redistribution, by confiscating higher incomes, means that the wealthy stop supporting life's amenities: no more grants to symphonies, museums, university endowments, parks, and so on. If these amenities are to continue to exist, the state must fund them directly. The state invariably will use a utilitarian calculus in deciding what to fund. One gray vision starts to prevail, not a thousand or hundreds of thousands of varied visions. Jouvenel implies that a bourgeois society is much more likely to support high culture than is a redistributionist state.

Jouvenel knew that the impulse to shake down the rich and give to the poor is a permanent temptation in democratic capitalist regimes. There will always be calls from those whom the market had not benefited to redress their plight through politics; and there will always be politicians ready to hear them out. Redistributionism is unlikely ever to disappear in modern societies, but we can try to limit its reach.

A real science of politics

Jouvenel's final contribution to the study of politics is a detailed analysis of its workings, not as a replacement for reflection on the good (as undertaken in Sovereignty) but as a supplement to it. The hope is to make political science useful to the statesman, who, as we have seen, has a responsibility of cultivating the social friendship and civility that vivifies the free society and slows the Minotaur's advance. Jouvenel's most ambitious effort in this vein is a difficult, chiseled book first published in 1963 and recently reissued by Liberty Fund Press: The Pure Theory of Politics.

This book focuses not on political statics (the juridical forms of constitutions and institutions) but on political dynamics: the phenomenon of "man moving man." One source of this influence is what Cicero called potestas: the authority that inheres in someone because of his institutional position. The U.S. military brass may not have liked the idea of draft-dodging ex-hippie Bill Clinton being their commander-in-chief, but their respect for the potestas of the presidency meant they jumped when he said jump. The other source is potentia: authority based on the raw ability to get men to do your bidding and follow your lead. It is the influence of an effective basketball coach or teacher, or, most importantly for Jouvenel's purpose, of the charismatic politician. It is as natural as rain.

Potentia can be a good thing in politics. Churchill's heroic rallying of the English people during World War II would have been unthinkable if he did not possess it. It can also be dangerously irrational, tapping into the volcanic forces that can sweep entire populations away in grand passions. How else to describe Hitler's Mephistophelean influence over the Germans? "It is profoundly unsafe to assume that people act rationally in Politics," Jouvenel somberly notes.

The ostensible aim of The Pure Theory of Politics is description. Jouvenel targeted the book to an audience of American social scientists who thought that the study of political life should be as free of values as the study of physics. Yet the book is a subtle critique of their abstract social science. Dry academicians said they looked at behavior, but what they meant were things like voting patterns, not strong behavior, behavior of the kind that Machiavelli chronicles with such cold lucidity.

Thus the real purpose of The Pure Theory of Politics is to remind liberal democrats, who often place unwarranted hopes in human reasonableness, that politics is not always, not often, guided by the light of reason; it is often messy, sinister, mad, and tragic, as Thucydides and Shakespeare--Jouvenel's chosen guides in this odd but beautiful book--teach us. Chastened by this lesson, perhaps today's leaders will see the fragility of liberal communities and strive to create the conditions for the growth of social friendship.

Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism has a lot to teach us, though for those who like their politics sunny-side up, it does not come as good news. Liberal democracies can attain true human goods, including meaningful freedom, social friendship, and widespread prosperity, Jouvenel reassures us. But these fragile societies must remain on guard, lest their many weaknesses--from the erosion of personal responsibility, to their tendency toward collectivism, to the abiding hope for final solutions--make dust of these goods.

BRIAN C. ANDERSON is senior editor of City Journal and author of Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

This is the sixth in our occasional series of "Reconsiderations." Previous essays have examined the works of Louis Hartz, Richard M. Titmuss, Herbert Croly, Marshall MeLuhan, and Frederick Douglass.

COPYRIGHT 2001 The National Affairs, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

Bibliography for "Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism"

Brian C. Anderson "Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism". Public Interest. Spring 2001. FindArticles.com. 07 Feb. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_2001_Spring/ai_73368521