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Ignatieff closes in

The next prime minister of Canada could be a philosophical historian. Michael Ignatieff, the former director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and current Canadian MP for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, is the favourite to win the leadership Liberal party of Canada at an election at the party’s conference in December. Ignatieff is a public intellectual (one of the top 50 in the world, according to Prospect magazine), an author, a journalist, and a public-affairs broadcaster. There is no shortage of controversy about Ignatieff’s candidacy. Critics point out that he has lived outside Canada for more than thirty years, his support for the Iraq war was a minority position among liberals, and his argument that democracies might have to resort to “lesser evil” tactics, such as indefinite detention of suspects in order to resist the greater evil of terrorism, received considerable criticism. In an article on the subject in

Prospect in April 2006 Ignatieff wrote, “Clear thinking about torture is not served by collapsing the distinction between coercive interrogation and torture. Both may be repugnant, but repugnance does not make them into the same thing.” He ended with an unequivocal rejection of torture but one which noted that a majority might well not agree. “If we are against torture, we are committed to arguing with our fellow citizens, not treating those who defend torture as moral monsters.”

The Philosophers' Magazine /4th quarter 2006

Ignatieff has sixteen books to his credit including a Booker-shortlisted novel, Scar Tissue . His biography of Isaiah Berlin was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His philosophical writings include The Needs of Strangers , The Rights Revolution , and The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror . If Ignatieff wins the election, his next goal will be to lead his party to victory in the federal elections, probably to be held in 2010, and so become Prime Minister. reporter/5

Death threat for defence of career women

The philosopher Linda R Hirshman received a death threat after writing that mothers should not abandon their careers. Hirshman wrote an article for American Prospect in December wondering why men do not exercise the same “choice” women do to give up their jobs and stay home to raise children. She also wrote an article for Inside Higher Education , expanding on the subject. There she wrote that women’s “decisions are a mistake because they lead them to lesser lives, by most measures, and because these decisions hurt society. And their decision is not freely chosen, even if they ‘chose’ it, as it is made in the context of an ide

ology that assigns childrearing and housekeeping to women, an ideology that, interviews reveal, they themselves accept.” Both articles received a good deal of attention, most of it hostile, on so-called “mommy blogs”. According

to the Boston Globe, Hirshman also received an unspecified death threat. Her book on the subject, soothingly titled Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, was published a few months later.

Jahanbegloo released

The Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (see Newshound, TPM 35) was released from Tehran’s Evin prison on August 30th. He had spent four months there without being formally charged. Hours after his release he gave an interview to Iran’s student news agency ISNA in which he said he had been duped into helping US organisations. “I used to write articles about Iran and the Middle East in some Web sites which I was not aware

were linked to intelligence services,” ISNA quoted him as saying. “While in prison, I reached the conclusion that the American organisations involved me in an affair which was not my intention to get involved in.” Many observers worried that he had been coerced into making this quasi-confession, perhaps via threats to his family. Hossein Derakhshan, however wrote in an article for Open Democracy that Jahanbegloo’s change of mind

was genuine; Rasool Nafisi, on the other hand, also in Open Democracy , called it a “repressive release”. See feature, p13

The Philosophers' Magazine /4th quarter 2006