Background
William Pfaff was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and was of German, English, and Irish origin. He grew up in Iowa and Georgia and graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1949, having majored in literary and political studies.
(In this "refreshing antidote to the swell of books about ...)
In this "refreshing antidote to the swell of books about the end of modernity" (Ivan Sanders, Commonweal), William Pfaff writes an enthralling narrative of the fall of empires and the rise of nations-- and with them, of modern nationalism, the most important of all political forces as we enter the next century. Rooted in the human need for secure place, communal loyalty, and individual identification, nationalism has both created nations and ruined them. It paved the way for Nazism but eventually destroyed it. It brought down the European colonial empires, but has left Africa confronting anarchy, and much of Asia dominated by ambitious and authoritarian new nations. It forced Soviet armies out of Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, and eventually led to the downfall of Communism. Writing with both urgency and sobriety, William Pfaff shows that without understanding this ineradicable factor in our political life, we cannot reckon with the realities that may await us.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671892487/?tag=2022091-20
(When Barbarian Sentiments first appeared in early 1989 th...)
When Barbarian Sentiments first appeared in early 1989 the Berlin Wall had not been breached, the Soviet Union was still an "evil empire," and the United States called itself the "leader of the free world." William Pfaff offered an iconoclastic, coruscating examination of America's predicament in a world that had escaped the conventions of American public debate and the old categories (and pieties) of American foreign policy. In this wholly revised and enlarged edition, Pfaff reconsiders American policy in the post-Cold War world. As he observed originally, it has been hard for us to accept that there are problems at the heart of American national security that may have no solution. We recoil from acknowledging the complexities and perversities of history, and there are exhausted ideas, Pfaff suggests, like dead stars, that continue to shape our political culture. The problem is how to free ourselves from them. At the beginning of a new century, this is ever more true, and Pfaff's troubled reflections on the moral significance of the American experience in the modern world is even more pertinent today than a decade ago.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809028069/?tag=2022091-20
(The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nati...)
The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism - The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism - by Pfaff, William ( Author ) Paperback Nov- 1994 Paperback Nov- 19- 1994
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IFQUNHG/?tag=2022091-20
(Calling nationalism the most powerful force in the world,...)
Calling nationalism the most powerful force in the world, the author of Barbarian Sentiments (a National Book Award nominee) traces its origins and shows how it divides, threatens, and dominates the post-Cold War world.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671728296/?tag=2022091-20
William Pfaff was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and was of German, English, and Irish origin. He grew up in Iowa and Georgia and graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1949, having majored in literary and political studies.
Pfaff served in infantry and Special Forces units of the United States Army during and after the Korean War. He became an editor of the lay-Catholic Commonweal magazine, leaving in 1955 for extensive travel in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. After a brief passage at American Broadcasting Company News in New York, he was invited to join Free Europe.
In 1971 he moved to Paris where he lived until his death.
His first book, THE NEW POLITICS: America and the End of the Postwar World (with Edmund Stillman) was published in 1961. Seven others have followed.
Robert Heilbroner wrote in 1964: "I suspect that in the future it will no longer be possible to qualify as a wholly serious thinker if one has not, to whatever small degree, made one"s peace or accommodation with harsh message." Between 1971 and 1992 he published more than seventy "Reflections" ("a political-literary form of your own invention," his editor, William Shawn, wrote to him), on international politics and society in The New Yorker magazine. He has written a newspaper column since 1978, currently published in more than 20 countries.
His magazine articles have appeared in The New York Review of, Harper’s, Foreign Affairs, World Policy Journal, The National Interest, and other publications in the United States, and elsewhere in Commentaire (Paris), Neue Zürcher Zeitung and DU magazine (both Zurich), Politica Exterior (Madrid), Europäische Rundschau (Vienna), Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik (Berlin), and other journals.
The American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Junior. has called him "Walter Lippmann’s authentic heir." He died of a heart attack after a fall in 2015.
(In this "refreshing antidote to the swell of books about ...)
(Calling nationalism the most powerful force in the world,...)
(The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nati...)
(When Barbarian Sentiments first appeared in early 1989 th...)
(Will be shipped from US. Brand new copy.)
Special Forces]
In 1961 he became one of the earliest members of the Hudson Institute.