The Engaged Intellect

Bernard-Henri Lévy, France's most irrepressibly public philosopher, says he's always been fighting the same adversary: "the will to purity," whether political or racial. In a long career of public causes, he has seen that ill will on the faces of Nazi sympathizers, the Soviet nomenklatura , Pakistani generals fighting against Bangladesh's independence, and Serb paramilitaries bent on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Now he sees it in militant Islam — which he believes is perilously close to acquiring nuclear arms.

Lévy's latest book was not prompted by political theory, but brute fact: the murder of kidnapped Wall Street...

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