Here’s a new definition of “intellectual” for you. It’s a man (or, of course, woman) who can say something like this with a straight face: “Of course there are pragmatic considerations in every life. If you have a beloved wife who is dying, you will devote a lot of time to her, and you forget about those who are suffering far away. That is ok. But there is no metaphysical, ontological, anthropological reason that makes you more responsible for this one who is close than for these others who are far away.” That is a summary by the French intellectual superstar Bernard-Henri Lévy of the thought of his fellow (Lithuanian-) French intellectual superstar—the species really only exists in France—Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). On this view, Levinas represents the reductio ad absurdum of Enlightenment thought. Taken seriously, the principle of Levinas “that fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus” would make war ethically impossible, and “BHL” (as he is known to his many fans in France) foregathered with a number of American intellectual luminaries in March of 2006 at Skidmore College to see, in effect, just how seriously this idea could be taken.

Pretty seriously as it turns out, now that an edited transcript of their lucubrations has been published in the Spring-Summer edition of Salmagundias “War, Evil, and America Now.” M. Lévy is clearly the Socrates of this Symposium, and the others who are present—Jonathan Schell, Benjamin Barber, Jean Elshtain, Jackson Lears, Carolyn Forché, Michael Massing,