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It is difficult not to see elements of desperation and despair, in much that is being said about the international situation. This is a time when events seem in the saddle; when attempts to control the technology of destruction seem all but hopeless; when American policies founded largely upon good will seem failing, and a major part of the world turns from us in disillusionment and often in hatred

Professor Crowley's "Comment on Professor Macpherson's Interpretation of Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom" is beguilingly titled. But my article was not an "interpretation." Interpretation is an exercise which, as Professor Crowley rightly implies, involves reading some assumptions into the text that is being interpreted. What I offered, on the contrary, was logical criticism of quite specific arguments of Friedman's, criticism which did not depend on speculation about his unstated assumptions. It is Professor Crowley who offers an interpretation, both of Friedman and of me, based on speculation about our assumptions. It is interesting, but it does not constitute the criticism of my arguments that Professor Crowley thinks it does. I have no quarrel in principle with speculation about assumptions: I am the last person to deny the usefulness of reading between the lines where that is necessary to clarify a text. But Friedman's text is quite clear. I thought mine was too: at least I addressed myself directly to Friedman's. Professor Crowley does not address himself as directly to mine. His criticism is sometimes not a criticism of what I wrote, but of what he, diverted by his own speculations, thought I must have meant (or of what he would have meant if, inconceivably, he had written what I wrote).

After the Oct. 7 murders, the first attempts to punish speakers focused on those who defended Hamas's murders. But, unsurprisingly, things have turned to trying to suppress criticism of Israel more broadly, including criticism of Israel's attacks on Gaza. (The slippery slope is a real phenomenon, in a culture where people reason by precedent and…