The Matador's Cape

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).

• Introduction; Part I. The Terrorist Enigma: 1. Did religious extremism cause 9/11?; Part II: Show of Force: 2. Why military superiority breeds illusions; 3. How the war was lost; 4. Radicals trapped in the past; 5. A self-inflicted wound; Part III. False Templates: 6. Searching for a new enemy after the Cold War; 7. Humanitarianism with teeth; 8. The war of the liberals; 9. The neoconservative intifada; Part IV. Waiving the Rules: 10. Liberalism strangled by war; 11. The unilateralist curse; 12. Battling lawlessness with lawlessness; 13: The infallibility trap; Conclusion.

'Holmes has written a powerful and philosophically erudite survey of what we think we understand about the 9/11 attacks.' Middle East Online