ABSTRACT
A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. François Bondy's spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de letres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.
