The late Christopher Hitchens had taught at the New School, and several cohorts of students in the Committee on Liberal Studies had gotten to know him well. But those of us who participated in the 2009 Democracy & Diversity Summer Institute in Poland will always remember him from Wroclaw.

The institute had just relocated from Krakow to Wroclaw, an old and booming city in western Poland (formerly Breslau, prewar Germany’s second largest city) to be closer to the challenging issues of an expanding Europe. Hitchens was working on his memoirs, published a year later as “Hitch 22,” and his visit to Wroclaw was a private journey to find out more about his Jewish great-grandmother from Kepno, a small town in Lower Silesia, not far from Wroclaw. We helped him get to Kepno accompanied by the head of the Wroclaw Jewish community, and to get access to archives there.

Hitch was more than generous in return. Long late-night intensive discussions with him were an amazing gift. We talked together about the place, the shifting borders, the shifted populations, the imprint of German Wroclaw, but also of Czech, Austrian, and Polish Wroclaw, and about the remnants of the Jewish past here, the languages and accents heard on the streets, and the social potential of borderlands in the new Europe.

We were walking through the park to Centennial Hall, an impressive modernist structure where Hitchens was to give a public talk, when the news came in from Oxford that Leszek Kolakowski, a youthful Marxist, then a critic of Communism, intellectual godfather of the Solidarity movement, and one of Europe’s most distinguished thinkers had just died.

We did not know that Christopher Hitchens had studied under Kolakowski at Oxford.  He quickly changed the focus of his talk, asked for a moment of silence, and spoke about the impact of developments in Eastern Europe on his generation of British leftist students. It was a magical moment, as it was at once a eulogy for his teacher, for his ancestors from Kepno, and for his youth.

The next morning, as we prepared for a study tour of Lower Silesia, somebody brought to the bus the morning newspapers, with headlines about Kolakowski. During someone’s impromptu translation from the articles so that everyone could hear, Hitch asked loudly, “In what other country would the death of a philosopher be reported on the first page of every major newspaper?!”

I wonder whether he knows that his death was reported on the first page of the New York Times.

We shall miss Hitch’s brilliant mind, scathing wit, and heart.

I am not completely satisfied with my last post. I’m afraid I wasn’t clear enough. I wanted to express my appreciation of Obama’s speech on Afghanistan, while highlighting what I see to be the limitations of his foreign policy. I wanted to show how, judged realistically, Obama’s speech on the Afghanistan drawdown was a significant advance, but also wanted to show why I think he did not go far enough. It’s about principles, not numbers.

Obama presented a vision of change in the direction of American foreign policy, although he didn’t fundamentally question the premise of America as a superpower with global responsibilities. I appreciate and support the vision, but question the premise. I also worry about the identification of defense of country and national security with military capability and response. But, I don’t expect the President of the United States to publicly challenge this identification. He is commander-in-chief and a politician who must ultimately make sense to the majority of the American people, while I can happily call myself a pragmatic pacifist, with all the contradictions that involves.  The speech struck me as being successful because Obama linked short terms goals with long term ends, i.e. withdrawing from an unpopular war while diminishing the power of Al Qaeda and giving Afghans a decent chance at determining their own just future, with changing the direction of American foreign policy.

I want a change of direction more radical than the President, but I still can’t be against all wars. Although I realize that non-violent action often gets things done more effectively and decisively than violent action, I believe that sometimes violence, including military force, is necessary. I understand, even support, the military action in Libya, but I also realize that the use of force in such situations is an indication of weakness. The most effective way to remove dictators with a democratic result is through non-violent action. But sometimes this is not possible, and thus, although democracy in Tunisia and Egypt is far from assured, it is much less likely in Syria, Libya and Yemen, not only because of the violence of the despots, but also because of the violent nature of the resistance. Political means have a way of defining their ends.

I find myself in an odd situation, the military interventions during my life time that have been most controversial from the beginning, in the former Yugoslavia and now in Libya, have been the ones I have favored. The ones that have been at least initially most popular, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf War and Vietnam, have been the ones I have found most problematic. I am more comfortable with international intervention when human rights and life are endangered, than calculated unilateral ideologically driven action, fighting against abstractions, be it international communism or the global jihad.

The other posts this week reflect on the question of war and peace as well. Corey is more or less of my generation. When he went to Vietnam, I went to college and made a decision to avoid military involvement at all costs. I tried to be a pacifist, but couldn’t persuade myself. But because I strongly objected to that war, I refused involvement. I was ready to go to Canada, but in the end, because of the accident of the draft lottery, it didn’t come to that. Many years later, I read, along with Michael, the stories about how poorly Vietnam vets were received upon their return, but I don’t remember anyone I knew responding to veterans in that way or ever seeing evidence of that sort of thing. I spent a lot of time with Vietnam vets in the summer of 1976 and 1977. I taught a course at the University of Chicago to future ROTC instructors, all Army captains and majors. We got along and compared my anti-war experience with their military experience. There were no reports of civilian antagonism to them. Perhaps they didn’t tell me, but I think just as likely is that the rumors of abuse were just that, rumors (as Gary Alan Fine knows is often the case).

To be sure, there was no celebratory homecoming. Yet, there also was no victory or even a definitive ending of the war to commemorate. Haltingly, Americans worked to come to terms with the experience of the war, as Corey recounts. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Moving Wall, Chicago’s Welcoming Home Parade, and much more, were commemorative acts that worked to put an end to the war and to remember it in a variety of different ways, from a variety of different viewpoints. I am rather convinced that this is the way it will be with military action in our times. There will be those who want to romantically celebrate heroes, but such romance will be elusive in wars that don’t have clear beginning and endings, or clear meanings. There will be political romantics, as Vince Carducci’s demonstrates in his review of Hitch 22, but I am convinced that they are becoming more marginal on the political scene. I think this is a good thing. Christopher Hitchens has been an entertaining clown when it comes to his support in Iraq, while the politics of such figures as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger were significantly more serious, and disastrous.

As is his custom, Gary Alan Fine is again provocative in his latest post. He presents a number of important observations. Rumor and atrocity feed war. The truthfulness of atrocity is often unknown and unknowable. In the specific case of the alleged rape of Iman Al-Obeidi , the way she claimed to be raped and tortured leads Fine to wonder. Telling the difference between claims of atrocity and atrocity in the time of war is difficult. And sharply in his conclusion: “if you give generals authority to fight, they find wars that have no need to be fought.” The replies to his post confirm its major theoretical point. There is a fog of war when it comes to atrocities, and this can be, and often is, manipulated.

But I would amend his conclusion. My amendment: “give generals the authority to fight wars, and they will fight.” The need or absence of need for war is a political question, to be decided through political leadership and in political debate. Obama has attempted to lead in his speech, and we have the responsibility to critically respond and to critically appraise truth claims.

I’ve been trying to figure out Christopher Hitchens for some ten years now. My first encounter with “Hitch” was in the fall of 2000 when he gave an impromptu talk on the writer’s life in the Mechanics Conference Room at the New School for Social Research in New York City. I had recently quit my longtime corporate-suit job in the Midwest and moved to Manhattan to go to grad school, and he was just coming onto the faculty as a visiting professor in my MA program in liberal studies. Hitchens spoke extemporaneously on a dizzying array of topics, from the evils of religion to the necessity of reading George Orwell to the benefits of grain spirits, punctuating important points with blasts of exhaled cigarette smoke. I was often reminded of that experience, minus the noxious tobacco fumes, while reading his memoir, Hitch-22, now out in paperback.

Indeed, Hitchens’ style in person and in print is tailor-made for the memoir form. Anyone familiar with his much-published writing, his frequent media appearances, and lectures will recognize the facility, abundant throughout the book, with which Hitchens moves from personal experience to grandiloquent pronouncement, tying things together with erudite disquisitions on literature, history, and the darker art of muckraking. A familiar tic is the construction “my dear friend [INSERT FAMOUS PERSON’S NAME]….” In that regard, most of the dramatis personae are familiar to regular Hitchens readers so there isn’t a whole lot that’s revelatory in these particular pages, except for the details, which admittedly tend to be more than interesting enough.

A couple of times in the book, Hitchens remarks on his being a late bloomer. And so it is that some have seen the core of Hitch-22 as the story of the author’s inner journey in adulthood from firebrand 1960s campus radical to geezery Tory. It’s a familiar Baby Boomer trope, of course (The Big Chill, anyone?), but one whose narrative trajectory has a longer history within modern liberal thought. (As nineteenth-century historian and statesman Francois Guizot said: “Not to be a republican [in the 1789 French Revolutionary sense] at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.”)

Anyone who has even passing familiarity with Hitchens’s writing and reputation knows the role he played in vociferously supporting the war in Iraq from what was then his position on the left. His chapter on Iraq is the book’s longest, and it traces his evolution on the subject. It begins with an explanation of his 1976 article published in the New Statesman opining on Saddam Hussein, then Iraqi vice president, as a potential progressive leader. To be sure, from the perspective of a Western post-colonialist writer, a theoretically modernizing secularist would have seemed on the face of it to be an improvement over exploitation under British Imperial rule on the one hand and repression by fundamentalist Arab monarchy on the other.

It took a bit for Hitchens to recognize that Hussein was an evil psycho, but in his telling he was already there on that point well before the saber rattling began on the part of George W. Bush & Co. For Hitchens, a self-professed intellectual in the Enlightenment tradition, Hussein’s irrational absolutism and, maybe even more troubling, his alleged unholy alliance-of-convenience with Islamic religious fundamentalism, sealed his condemnation. Citing Orwell, Hitchens observed in the wake of September 11 (and I can’t remember if it was the next week during the New School graduate class meeting he mentions in the book or later at the Cedar Tavern in the Village before heading out on assignment to Afghanistan) that every issue has those who are on the side of progress and those who are against it. Though Hitchens doesn’t specifically say so, throwing his lot in with the neocons and other war hawks appears to be a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” While he does have harsh words for the malfeasance of the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war, he maintains his satisfaction with the outcome. (As he glibly put it on Bill Maher’s program a while back, “right idea, wrong execution.”)

Many liberal readers likely won’t find Hitchens’s explication persuasive. For one thing there’s his defense of Paul Wolfowitz and also of Ahmad Chalaby. (There’s the old saying, “Lie down with dogs and get up with fleas.”) More disconcerting is the however begrudging acceptance of the mess created in Iraq by the minions of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism” (which anyone with the intellect of a Christopher Hitchens must recognize as Empire in its postmodern guise) as a regrettable but on balance tolerable consequence in liberating the people of Iraq from Hussein’s despotic rule. A possible defense in this regard is the extremely long-term perspective articulated in Immanuel Kant‘s 1784 essay, required reading in the New School liberal studies program “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View”: that humankind’s “unsociable sociability” (Kant’s term for the brute survival instinct with which nature has endowed the species) will dialectically lead to a rational civil order in the end. That seems like small consolation to the millions whose lives and/or livelihoods are sacrificed in the meantime.

A thread that runs throughout Hitch-22 is the author’s lifelong attempt to intellectually keep “two sets of books,” or as he alternatively puts it, “have it both ways.” Early on this took the form of seeking out alternative positions even within oppositional points of view (i.e., the revolution within the revolution). This earned him the title “contrarian,” a label he rejects. A less judgmental, though albeit more pedantic, assessment would again come from Kant, in this case his essay also from 1784 and also required reading at the New School, “What is Enlightenment?” In particular, it has to do with Kant’s idea of enlightenment as one’s emergence from “self-imposed immaturity,” (in German selbstverschuldeten sometimes translated “self-imposed tutelage”), or put more simply daring to think for oneself. What some will interpret as an opportunistic move from left to right, Hitchens simply sees as coming into his own.

In the book’s conclusion, Hitchens notes his desire to always repudiate “the totalitarian principle, in the mind as well as in politics.” The embrace of continual doubt and self-criticism is what constitutes the eponymous “Hitch-22.” This struck a chord in that I’d been reading twentieth-century German political philosopher Carl Schmidt right before taking up Hitchens’s memoir.

Schmidt is famous (or should I say infamous) for his concept of the “total” state from which the term totalitarianism derives. Schmidt is also known for his analysis in the 1922 book Political Theology of the state of exception, the unforeseen calamitous circumstance, provided for in Article 48 of the Weimer Constitution, allowing the executive branch to assume sovereign power in order to ensure political and social stability. Adolf Hitler invoked Article 48 in suspending democratic authority to establish the Nationalist Socialist government. It’s a principle also arguably explored by Bush Administration advisors (including Wolfowitz) as evidenced by rumors floated regarding the use of the wartime emergency as a rationale for possibly cancelling national elections in the US and the more palpable efforts at expanding presidential power and curtailing individual civil liberties under the theory of the “unitary executive.”

But more relevant is the argument made in another of Schmidt’s books from the 1920s, Political Romanticism, which did more to explain the vagaries of Christopher Hitchens for me than this memoir. According to Schmidt, the most important ideal of romanticism is preservation of the autonomous self. Among the hallmarks of the romantic are irony and aesthetics as defense mechanisms against any and all external forces impinging upon the individual. It consists among other things in the “poeticizing of politics,” treating political events as occasions for “romantic productivity,” that is, expressions of individual creativity of which punditry is an example par excellence. It also manifests itself in a refusal to ultimately commit, keeping oneself safe from the damaging emotional effects of uncomfortable realities.

Political romanticism also explains the one thing Hitchens has never suspended, his militant atheism, perhaps most notably documented in the bestseller god Is Not Great, which was nominated for the National Book Award. (Although I’m not sure why, it’s neither particularly well written nor well argued. For some finer Hitchens writing, pick up Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere.) As Schmidt notes, secularism underlies romanticism in that it removes God as the transcendent principal of the universe and replaces him/her/it/whatever with the individual transcendental ego. (There’s that damned Kant again!)

None of this is to say that Hitch-22 isn’t good reading. There are withering criticisms, amusing quips, and trenchant observations galore. Just think twice about taking it too much to heart.

Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared on the webzine PopMatters.