Andreï Sakharov a beaucoup misé sur l’appui de ses collègues occidentaux dans le combat qu’il a mené pour la libération de l’URSS. Il était en effet conscient de leur prestance face à un régime soviétique pétri de scientisme. Le boycottage de leurs échanges avec l’Union soviétique se présenterait alors comme la mesure de solidarité ultime pour des scientifiques dont la propension naturelle est la communication internationale. Ce livre se concentre sur ce boycottage en faveur de Sakharov et révèle, (...) en raison des proportions inédites du mouvement, la stature morale et la dimension historique de ce personnage. S’en trouvent éclairés, du coup, un moment capital de la guerre froide de même que l’indissolubilité des droits de l’homme et de la sécurité internationale, fondement de la « doctrine Sakharov » et principe clé des relations internationales contemporaines. (shrink)

This essay, written in memory of the Chinese astrophysicist and dissident Fang Lizhi, reexamines the period in Fang's life when he was vice president of the University of Science and Technology of China and, because of his activities as an educational and political reformer, came to be dubbed “China's Andrei Sakharov.” It also retells, from the perspective of an insider, the dramatic narrative of Fang's year with his wife, Li Shuxian, living in the US embassy in Beijing following the (...) Tiananmen Square demonstrations and subsequent massacre. But the special focus of this overview of Fang's career is on his development as a thinker on questions of politics and human rights. Though Fang never returned to China and, while living in the United States, kept his distance from dissident movements, he continued to develop intellectually in ways that made him, in later life, China's Václav Havel. (shrink)

This paper focuses on what can be said to be the definitive features of the approach to theology by three Russian theologians: Fathers Sergii Bulgakov and Georges Florovsky as well as the Venerable Father Sophrony Sakharov. The article argues that the following common themes characterize the nature of their theology. First, personalism, in other words, the use of the term “person”, which they extensively applied to both God and human and angelic beings. The concept of person is indispensable in (...) the thought of all three theologians. The second common theme is how the authors understood the relationship between theology and experience and what is the significance of religious experience for philosophical theology. Finally, all three theologians agree that when theological truths are expressed in human language the problem of interpretation consequently arises. However, they answer in different ways the question of the number and status of possible theological languages. I conclude that it is St. Sophrony Sakharov who in his life and theology realized Florovsky’s famous call for a neo-patristic synthesis. (shrink)

This superb collection by the eminent physicist and critic John Ziman, opens with an album of portraits of scientists--Albert Einstein, Freeman Dyson, Lev Landau, Mark Azbel, Andrei Sakharov. Ziman takes readers into the world of the contemporary scientist, showing how discoveries are made and how claims are tested. He then travels into the minds of scientists as they are drawn into competing directions. Here Ziman exposes the path of discovery, which is strewn with complex human needs, governmental restrictions, the (...) desire for profits, and the exercise of technical virtuosity. (shrink)

‘IB was one of the great affirmers of our time.’ John Banville, New York Review of Books The title of this final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters is echoed by John Banville’s verdict in his review of its predecessor, Building: Letters 1960–75, which saw Berlin publish some of his most important work, and create, in Oxford’s Wolfson College, an institutional and architectural legacy. In the period covered by this new volume (1975–97) he consolidates his intellectual legacy with a series of (...) essay collections. These generate many requests for clarification from his readers, and stimulate him to reaffirm and sometimes refine his ideas, throwing substantive new light on his thought as he grapples with human issues of enduring importance. Berlin’s comments on world affairs, especially the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the collapse of Communism, are characteristically acute. This is also the era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and wars in the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. Berlin scrutinises the leading politicians of the day, including Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, and draws illuminating sketches of public figures, notably contrasting the personas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. He declines a peerage, is awarded the Agnelli Prize for ethics, campaigns against philistine architecture in London and Jerusalem, helps run the National Gallery and Covent Garden, and talks at length to his biographer. He reflects on the ideas for which he is famous – especially liberty and pluralism – and there is a generous leavening of the conversational brilliance for which he is also renowned, as he corresponds with friends about politics, the academic world, music and musicians, art and artists, and writers and their work, always displaying a Shakespearean fascination with the variety of humankind. Affirming is the crowning achievement both of Berlin’s epistolary life and of the widely acclaimed edition of his letters whose first volume appeared in 2004. (shrink)

Creativity and civil courage are major dimensions of an intellectual's authority and contribute towards the enrichment of democracy. This book develops a sociological account of civil courage and creative behaviour in order to enhance our understanding of the nature of intellectuals' involvement in society. Barbara A. Misztal employs both theoretical-analytic and empirical components to develop a typology of intellectuals who have shown civil courage and examines the biographies of twelve Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including Elie Wiesel, Andrei Sakharov and (...) Linus C. Pauling, to illustrate acts of courage which have embodied the values of civil society. She advances our understanding of the nature of intellectuals' public involvement and their contribution to social well-being. In the current climate of fear and insecurity, as governments are forced to deal with issues of increasing complexity, this is a pioneering sociological book with a highly original approach. (shrink)

Roy Medvedev's new book reflects an important change among ruling circles in the Soviet Union, a willingness fundamentally to transform and improve Moscow-Beijing relations by making concessions to China away from the hard-line stance long backed by Soviet conservatives. Anti-Stalinist historian Medvedev details the assumptions underlying this major redirection of Soviet policy. Even the errors and omissions in Medvedev's important book are illuminating. In contrast to Andrei Sakharov, however, Medvedev's nationalism blinds him from seeing some key China-Soviet Union realities. (...) While Medvedev acknowledges that Brezhnev in 1970 sought United States support for a Soviet attack on China, nonetheless, “the chief part in creating the danger of war on the Sino-Soviet border was played by the Chinese leadership” (p. 55). (shrink)

This book has been written for our time of need. It is an affirmative declaration of human values at a time of crisis in what the author regards as the great moral revolution of our age. It began when Paul Kurtz published the four-page Humanist Manifesto II in The Humanist magazine. The reaction was volcanic. The New York Times carried an extensive front-page story on it, as did hundreds of newspapers throughout the United States and abroad. The controversy is unabated. (...) Theologians throughout the country continue to attack and defend the Manifesto. In Russia, Andrei Sakharov, one of the signers of the Manifesto, was given a warning about his collaboration with Western liberals, and then subjected to a large-scale attack in the Soviet Press. The generative ideas presented in the controversial Manifesto are fully developed in this powerful book. In Part I, Kurtz takes us on a tour of the chief religious and moral philosophies available to Western man at this time. He gives detailed critiques of Christian theism and of Marxism. He shows how the original humanism of Marx has been betrayed in the Communist nations. "The crux of the tragedy of modern Communist societies is that they have abandoned these fundamental human rights . . ." In Part II, "The Humanist Alternative," Kurtz brilliantly develops a positive viewpoint, a dynamic presentation of the elements of "the good life" in which we may realize "the human potential and the fullness of being." The author here describes the virtues of the sensual life, the joys and benefits of physical pleasure, and the various ways by which we achieve true self-realization. This section concludes with chapters on libertarianism, the principle of equality, and the democratic ethic inherent in the humanist philosophy. In Part III the author provides an arresting exposition of international problems and their intelligent solution. He stresses the global consciousness of the humanist outlook and its allegiance to all humanity, and demonstrates how the methods of reason can be applied in our personal lives and in world affairs. (shrink)

The theoretical debate in linguistics during the past half-century bears an uncanny parallel to the politics of the (now defunct) Communist Bloc. The parallels are not so much in the revolutionary nature of Chomsky's ideas as in the Bolshevik manner of his takeover of linguistics (Koerner 1994) and in the Trotskyist (“permanent revolution”) flavor of the subsequent development of the doctrine of Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) (Townsend & Bever 2001, pp. 37–40). By those standards, Jackendoff is quite a party faithful (...) (a Khrushchev or a Dubcek, rather than a Solzhenitsyn or a Sakharov) who questions some of the components of the dogma, yet stops far short of repudiating it. (shrink)

We present an approach to understanding the origin of inertia involving the electromagnetic component of the quantum vacuum and propose this as a step toward an alternative to Mach's principle. Preliminary analysis of the momentum flux of the classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation impinging on accelerated objects as viewed by an inertial observer suggests that the resistance to acceleration attributed to inertia may be at least in part a force of opposition originating in the vacuum. This analysis avoids the ad hoc (...) modeling of particle-field interaction dynamics used previously by Haisch, Rueda, and Puthoff (Phys. Rev. A 49, 678, (1994)) to derive a similar result. This present approach is not dependent upon what happens at the particle point, but on how an external observer assesses the kinematical characteristics of the zero-point radiation impinging on the accelerated object. A relativistic form of the equation of motion results from the present analysis. Its manifestly covariant form yields a simple result that may be interpreted as a contribution to inertial mass. We note that our approach is related by the principle of equivalence to Sakharov's conjecture (Sov. Phys. Dokl. 12, 1040, (1968)) of a connection between Einstein action and the vacuum. The argument presented may thus be construed as a descendant of Sakharov's conjecture by which we attempt to attribute a mass-giving property to the electromagnetic component—and possibly other components—of the vacuum. In this view the physical momentum of an object is related to the radiative momentum flux of the vacuum instantaneously contained in the characteristic proper volume of the object. The interaction process between the accelerated object and the vacuum (akin to absorption or scattering of electromagnetic radiation) appears to generate a physical resistance (reaction force) to acceleration suggestive of what has been historically known as inertia. (shrink)

Chomsky's conservatism, with its explicit distrust of politicians and corporate managers, may explain why his most strident critics are to be found among liberals. Two of Britain's liberal newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer, attack him more regularly than the right-wing press does. Chomsky may have earned their ire by pointing out from time to time mistakes made in their news pages, particularly in war zones. Observer reviewer Rafael Behr summarized Hopes and Prospects and concluded that Chomsky should recognize "the (...) irony that he owes his considerable success to the system he despises." Let us suppose for a moment that Behr is right, that Chomsky's considerable success is an achievement of the system rather than of Chomsky's genius and insights into the nature of language that have transformed modern philosophy and psychology as much as they have linguistic studies. Would he have said that Andrei Sakharov "owes his considerable success to the system he despises"? Sakharov became a victim of the Soviet system after his discoveries in physics, but the importance of Sakharov as political critic (rather than as physicist) was that he criticized a system that he believed was harmful to world peace, human dignity and the society of which he was a beneficiary. The same can, and should, be said of Chomsky. (shrink)

The revival of dissidence was one of the paradoxes of the Putin era. During the terminal crisis of the Soviet Union and the early years of the Yeltsin presidency, the dissidents of the 1970s were celebrated as prophets of democracy and Russian nationhood. But unlike their East Central European counterparts, they achieved little political success in the post-Communist era. Despite Boris Yeltsin's pose as a disciple of Sakharov and his courtship of Solzhenitsyn, the most prominent dissidents were at the (...) margins of politics by the late 1990s. To many observers, they were relics of another age. Yet under the increasingly.. (shrink)