The Economist Test

America leads the world but does it rule it? And what should we feel about being part of the empire, if it is one?

AS THE civilian death toll in Iraq continues to mount at an undiminished rate, as the prison scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay continue to undermine any claim to a moral high ground, and as America continues to be a deliberate laggard in adjusting its energy policy to take account of global warming, it has become steadily harder to find non-Americans willing to agree that on balance American leadership makes the world a better place. That doesn't make the notion wrong, however. Enter Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy expert at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. His previous, very compelling book, "The Ideas that Conquered the World" (2002), explored how peace, democracy and free markets had become the world's dominant ideals. Now, his new book argues that the country that stands most squarely behind those aspirations, the United States, also acts as a sort of surrogate government for the globe - and that we would all be a lot worse off if it didn't ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5381884

IT WAS 1963 and the atmosphere at the State Mutual Life Assurance Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, was tense. Workers fretted about an approaching merger with another company. Who would stay and who would get the heave-ho? So the management commissioned an advertising man by the name of Harvey R. Ball to come up with something cheerful to smooth wrinkled brows and make the whole merger process a little more bearable for everyone ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5381875

Russian archives, long closed to scholars, are adding crucial details to the old story of the cold war, as a new history shows

WHERE does history end and current affairs begin? John Lewis Gaddis, who is often described as the dean of cold-war historians, has no doubts about his own special subject. To his students at Yale University, many of whom were still children when the confrontation with the Soviets ended in 1989, he writes, the cold war is "history: not all that different from the Peloponnesian War". With a mixture of wistfulness and wonderment, Mr Gaddis notes: "When I talk about Stalin and Truman, even Reagan and Gorbachev, it could as easily be Napoleon, Caesar or Alexander the Great" ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5354423

GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ and Baruch de Spinoza (known also by his Latin name, Benedictus, and to his friends as Bento) were among the giants of the 17th century. Ever since then, their ideas have exercised a huge influence over the way people think about almost everything. Both philosophers reflected a great deal about the existence of God, and believed in a kind of God; but they also played a part in the modern era's shift of consciousness from a God-centred view of reality to a man-centred one ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5354416

POPULAR images of African exploration come mostly from the east of the continent, which was scoured by young buccaneers for the source of the Nile and where, in 1871, Henry Morton Stanley, an American, presumed to find Dr David Livingstone. Yet for a wave of explorers who braved Muslim fanatics and malarial mosquitoes almost a century before, west Africa was the great enthusiasm ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5354407

IN 1892, Crown Prince Nicholas of Russia travelled to Bari, in south-eastern Italy, to visit the basement of a medieval basilica. There he prayed over the remains of his saintly namesake, a Christian bishop who had ruled, 15 centuries earlier, over part of present-day Turkey. The crypt's marble floor, a gift from the royal pilgrim, is one legacy of that visit ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5327768

AS CHRISTMAS nears, American children begin to worry about Grinches. What if Dr Seuss's scary anti-hero, the scourge of Whoville with a "heart two sizes too small", were to visit their home town? What if he were to slide down the chimney and steal their presents? It is a reasonable fear ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5327759

AS CHRISTMAS nears, American children begin to worry about Grinches. What if Dr Seuss's scary anti-hero, the scourge of Whoville with a "heart two sizes too small", were to visit their home town? What if he were to slide down the chimney and steal their presents? It is a reasonable fear ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5327759

THE emphasis on making war has shifted, for most western nations, from "organising our forces to defend our territory" to "using them to secure our people and our way of life". General Sir Rupert Smith, the British officer who commanded the UN forces in Bosnia a decade ago, the British armoured division in the first Gulf war and, later, all the troops in Northern Ireland, has a long and varied experience of the new warfare. His first book, "The Utility of Force", ought to be read, marked and inwardly digested by anyone responsible for committing armed forces to military operations ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5327742

SIR TOM STOPPARD admits to a feeling of "enormous presumption" at the transfer to Moscow of "The Coast of Utopia", his trilogy about 19th-century Russian intellectuals. But perhaps only a foreign writer could have resurrected its heroes so compassionately: some, such as Alexander Herzen, suffered death-by-canonisation during the Soviet era and are quite unloved in their homeland. If in London, where the plays premiered in 2002, overcoming the characters' obscurity was a challenge, in Moscow the issue will be prejudice ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5327726

TOM PAULIN, a British poet and literary critic, is a subtle scrutineer of language. In this collection of essays, he gives an account of some of the greatest literary works in English, including Shakespeare's sonnets, Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and James Joyce's "Ulysses" ...

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?
story_id=5327735