Time Out of Mind
Time’s favorite terrorist

By Ramesh Ponnuru
December 13, 2001 12:05 p.m.

s this really the best moment for Time magazine to celebrate the work of a terrorist? This week's issue profiles seven "thinkers exploring new ideas." Among them are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the authors of the much-discussed recent tome Empire.Time's profile mentions that Negri is "living under house arrest in Rome," but leaves this minor biographical detail unexplained. The missing explanation is that Negri was associated with the Red Brigades in the 1970s, and is believed to have had a hand in the kidnapping and murder of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. Indeed, he is believed to have called Moro's wife to taunt her just before Moro was shot dead.

But hey, water under the bridge, right? The trouble is that Negri, now joined by Hardt, is still an apologist for terrorism. Not that you'd ever guess that from Michael Elliott's profile. It merely has the authors "reaching back to early Marxism and forward to postmodernist literary theory." (Now there's a marriage that one would expect to yield all sorts of useful ideas!) In fact, they are proud to call themselves "communists."

The great "new idea" that they are lauded for having is that globalization is both liberatory and destabilizing. By making this point they have allegedly "cut through one of the most tedious debates in contemporary politics." Please. The argument is utterly banal. The spin that Hardt and Negri put on the idea, meanwhile, is the same one that orthodox Marxists always have. (Hardt even told the New York Times that Negri and he "don't think of this as a very original book.") Remember, Marx viewed capitalism as a positive historical development, a necessary way station on the road from feudalism to communism.

Armed with this analysis, Hardt and Negri commend Islamist fanaticism-along with riots in Los Angeles, Seattle, or just about anywhere else-as a form of resistance to capitalism that will help move the world to a higher stage. "Insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful rejection of the world market, we might think of it as the first postmodern revolution." As for terrorism, they put the word in sneer quotes.

What on earth came over Michael Elliott? He's not usually an idiot.

Time's Favorite Perjurer
In the same section of Time, David Bjerklie profiles another big thinker: philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Here again, Time leaves out crucial details about its favored intellectuals. Nussbaum's courtroom testimony in a gay-rights case "sparked an uproar in academic circles." Indeed it did-although not as big an uproar as it should have. What Time doesn't mention is the reason for the uproar. It wasn't Nussbaum's gay-rights activism, which is hardly controversial in the academy. It was the credible charges that she had perjured herself in her testimony. Time says that Nussbaum "has been savagely criticized for her zeal, her sense of mission and her moral certitude"; that sentence would be just fine if it ended with "and for lying in court." But maybe Time doesn't take perjury all that seriously, as evidenced by its tongue-to-shoelace coverage of President Clinton in 1998.