Berman, who started his intellectual career in the early nineteen-seventies, as an anthologist of anarchist quotations, has emerged as a prominent critic of liberal-left pieties. In “A Tale of Two Utopias” (1996), he reprimanded the American student radicals of the sixties for failing to recognize the evil of Communism. In “Terror and Liberalism” (2003), he scolded liberals too timid to join what he saw as America’s crusade for liberal democracy in Iraq. His recent writings call for unambiguous ideological commitment in what he describes as a worldwide clash between liberalism and totalitarianism (or “fascism,” which Berman prefers, since to hear the “pungent” word “is to flare your nostrils”)
