Writer Jonathan Schell Is Dead
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March 26, 2014
The American writer Jonathan Schell died last night, of cancer, in his home in Brooklyn. Although I doubt he would have put it this way or even thought of himself this way, he was a luminous, noble, bearer of an American civic-republican tradition that’s inherently cosmopolitan and embracing but that draws on deep wellsprings that he knew, like few others, how to plumb.Â
From his beginnings as a brave young Vietnam War correspondent for The New Yorker,  and his meticulous yet sweeping case for nuclear disarmament in The Fate of the Earth,  through his magisterial re-thinking of the both state power and people’s power in The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People , as well as in his wry but rigorous assessments of politics for The Nation, Jonathan poured the best of a distinctively American, progressive tradition – and, it seemed to me, of a WASP cultural sensibility, about which he was ambivalent and  humorously self-deprecating – into the transracial, global civil society whose future is dimmed a bit by its loss of what would have been Jonathan’s continuing  insight, magnanimity, and love.
