The Director of the International Studies Center at New York University believes that the world has recently made giant strides towards becoming much fairer. He makes the case as well as it could be made, but possessing apparently no sense of wonder and not much of historical perspective, Thomas Franck doesn't seem to realise how extraordinary a claim it is. Whoever, anywhere, before our own later 20th century, thought that the world could be 'fair'? Was ineradicable unfairness not the common perception? And if this has been more or less the shape of things through the millennia, how could our fifty years ring in such giant changes, and how permanent can we expect them to be?

LRB 22 August 1996 | PDF Download