The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror

Stephen Holmes

Apr 2007 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

The Matador's Cape delves into the causes of the catastrophic turn in American policy at home and abroad since 9/11. In a collection of searing essays, the author explores Washington's inability to bring 'the enemy' into focus, detailing the ideological, bureaucratic, electoral and (not least) emotional forces that severely distorted the American understanding of, and response to, the terrorist threat. He also shows how the gratuitous and disastrous shift of attention from al Qaeda to Iraq was shaped by a series of misleading theoretical perspectives on the end of deterrence, the clash of civilizations, humanitarian intervention, unilateralism, democratization, torture, intelligence gathering and wartime expansions of presidential power. The author's breadth of knowledge about the War on Terror leads to conclusions about present-day America that are at once sobering in their depth of reference and inspiring in their global perspective.

About the author

After receiving his PhD from Yale in 1976, Holmes taught briefly at Yale and Wesleyan Universities before becoming a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1978. From Princeton, he moved to Harvard University's Department of Government, where he stayed until 1985, the year he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago, Professor Stephen Holmes served as Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe and as editor-in-chief of the East European Constitutional Review. He has also been the Director of the Soros Foundation program for promoting legal reform in Russia and Eastern Europe. Holmes' research centers on the history of European liberalism and the disappointments of democracy and economic liberalization after communism. In 1984, he published Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. Since then, he has published a number of articles on democratic and constitutional theory as well as on the theoretical origins of the welfare state. In 1988, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a study of the theoretical foundations of liberal democracy. He was a member of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin during the 1991 academic year. His Anatomy of Antiliberalism appeared in 1993. And in 1995, he published Passions and Constraint: The Theory of Liberal Democracy; in this work, Holmes presents a spirited vindication of classical liberalism and its notions of constitutional government. He coauthored, with Cass Sunstein, a book on The Cost of Rights (Norton, 1998).