Paul Berman

Paul Lawrence Berman (born 1949) is an American writer on politics and literature whose articles and reviews have appeared in numerous influential publications.

His books include Terror and Liberalism (a New York Times best-seller in 2003), The Flight of the Intellectuals, A Tale of Two Utopias, Power and the Idealists, and an illustrated children's book, Make-Believe Empire. He edited, among other anthologies, Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems, for the American Poets Project of the Library of America.

Born to a Jewish family, Berman attended Columbia University, receiving an M.A. in American history in 1973. He is a contributing editor of The New Republic and a member of the editorial board of Dissent. He has been awarded fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations and from the Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers at the New York Public Library. He was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is also an Advisory Editor at Fathom: For a deeper understanding of Israel and the region.

In Terror and Liberalism, Berman offers a theory of totalitarianism. In his interpretation, totalitarian movements of the right and the left arose in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War as a reaction to the successes and failures of liberal civilization. The ideologies promoted mythologies of world events that were paranoid, apocalyptic, utopian, obsessed with purity, and ultimately nihilist. The totalitarian movements were, in Berman's account, mass mobilizations for unattainable aims.

...
Wikipedia