Introducing our New Issue: Distinctions that Define and Divide

We are happy to announce that the newest issue, "Distinctions that Define and Divide," is making its way to mailboxes around the globe and is now available to subscribers online. The summer issue takes up the question of cultural capital and how symbols of identity and consumption shape (and often distort) contemporary politics.

From the editor: "Capital, in the broadest sense, is anything that confers benefit or value on its owner," writes editor Jay Tolson, "though we normally associate it with financial assets: the wealth that is used to buy something in order to sell it for profit.

"But the capital of the economists is not the only capital that 'makes the world go 'round.' In the world that modern commerce helped transform, the gradual dissolution of the traditional hierarchies allowed—indeed encouraged—greater movement up (and down) the social ladder. And the group identified most closely with such mobility was the bourgeoisie, or what came to be known as the middle classes. Members of this broad and elastic social formation made their way in the world through enterprising efforts, acquiring not only wealth but also other forms of capital, including education, affiliations, social networks, special forms of knowledge, manners, tastes, and styles of consumption. Now often called cultural, social, symbolic, or intellectual capitals, these forms of distinguishing capital not only signaled and reinforced one's wealth (while aiding in the accumulation of more), they also conferred respectability and even moral worth on those who possessed or displayed them.

"The dynamics and power of such capitals of distinction—the thematic focus of the present issue—have never been simple or absolute."

From the latest issue: First we had Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, now we have Jerry Falwell Jr. and Paula White. And Eric Metaxas sucker punching a guy on the streets of D.C. What has become of the culture wars? In "The Long, Withdrawing Roar," Philip S. Gorski argues that this new cast of characters indicates a significant shift from what he calls culture wars to culture clashes. That is, what we see today is less a series of battles in an ongoing war over abortion, for example, or pornography, but rather something not nearly as organized or consistent. These are irregular forms of cultural and political combat, Gorski points out, that lack the strategic belligerence that characterized earlier generations.

"The new politics of culture clashes is not in the interest of established economic, political, or religious elites. Nor is it rooted in affirmative values or concrete policies," writes Gorski, professor of sociology and religious studies at Yale. "Culture skirmishers do not have a positive agenda, apart from 'winning.' They are against things, not for things."

Also from the latest issue: Louis Menand is back again with a new book, The Free World, this one on American culture and ideas between World War II and the Vietnam Era. As writer Jackson Arn argues, it epitomizes everything that's brilliant, if nevertheless frustratingly predictable, about a world seen through the lens of The New Yorker.

"A staff writer for such a magazine, it follows, will specialize in a certain urbane-naive tone, cautiously erudite in some places and cavalierly blunt in others. In his twenty years with The New Yorker, Menand has got this tone down to a science. He writes gorgeously about things everybody's heard of; he makes old hat sparkle with fresh insight (see, for instance, his essays on Dr. Seuss and J.D. Salinger). He qualifies and simplifies, sometimes in the same sentence. The unit with which he seems most comfortable isn't the emblematic individual but the emblematic collective—the mythic oversimplification in want of some (but not too much) nuance. 'This was a caricature,' Menand writes, strangely but tellingly, about Isaiah Berlin's analysis of Marx, 'although not an unfair one.' Menand is the master of fair caricature."

Web Features: In "Writing a Life," Alan Jacobs considers Hermann Hesse's last novel, The Glass Bead Game, and the fictional "scholarly" province of Castalia where each member of the community is free to pursue any course of study that he desires to pursue, with only one caveat: Each year he must write a Life. That is, a narrative of his life as it would have been if he had been born in another time and place.

Jacobs argues that this sort of task is one filled with promise and peril in our particular cultural moment: "Is the writing of a Life a game that, in our current moment, can be played? Hesse described each imagined Life as an 'entelechy,' that is, the realization of a potential—but perhaps that assumes something like the pre-existence of souls, an Identity that somehow exists before it is embodied in, realized in, a particular culture, a particular gender, a particular ethnicity. In other words, it may be that the very concept of writing a life presupposes a humanism, an idea of the human spirit that precedes any particular embedding. Can we, dare we, think this?"

From the archives: That most summer of holidays, perfect for grilling and long, lingering evenings, is upon us here in the United States: Independence Day weekend. It's an observance that, at least originally, marked a transformation of America's relationship to the rest of the world. Back in the spring of 2003, political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations, wrote about the role of the U.S. in international relations in the early twenty-first century.

"In this uni-multipolar world, the global power structure has four levels. At the top, the United States has preeminence in every domain of power. At the second level are major regional powers, which are the dominant actors in important areas of the world but whose interests and capabilities do not extend as globally as those of the US. These include the European Union, Russia, China, India, Iran, Brazil, and others. These countries obviously vary greatly in importance, activity, and degree of dominance. At a third level are secondary regional powers whose influence in their region is less than that of the major regional powers. Finally, at the fourth level are all the remaining countries, some of which are quite important for various reasons but which do not play roles in the global power structure comparable to countries at the top three levels."

Read "America in the World."