William Pfaff is an American writer on contemporary history and politics. He writes a twice-weekly editorial column for The International Herald Tribune in Paris, internationally syndicated by The Los Angeles Times. Between 1971 and 1992 he regularly contributed political essays, published as "Reflections," to the The New Yorker magazine. He has also written for Foreign Affairs, Commentaire, The New York Review of Books, etc.
His most recent book is The Wrath of Nations, Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism, an examination of nationalism’s origins an implications, published by Simon & Schuster in New York and London in 1993. It has since been published in German and Spanish translations (Die Furien des Nationalismus, Eichborn Verlag; La Ira de las Naciones, Editorial Andres Bello), and an Italian translationis in preparation.
His Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends, published in New York in 1989 and in Paris, Frankfurt, and Lisbon, was a finalist for the U.S. National Book Award European prize for a political work in French, the City of Geneva’s Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
He is author or co-author of four other books on contermporary history or American foreign relations, including two influential 1960s critiques of U.S. foreign policy, The New Politics and Power and Impotence. The Politics of Hysteria, The Sources of 20th Century Conflict (1964) dealt with the impact of the modern west on the non-western civilizations. (Like the two foreign-policy works, it was a collaboration with the late Edmund Stillman.) His Condemned to Freedom (1971) was an examination of the internal crisis of liberal society. His autobiographical essay, "The Lay Intellectual," was included in Best American Essays 1987.
He was, in 1961, one of the earliest members of the American policy research group The Hudson Institute, and from 1971 to 1978 was Deputy Director of its European Affiliate, Hudson Research Europe, Ltd. Before that he was an executive of the Free Europe Committee, parent-organization of Radio Free Europe and the Free Europe Press, and in the early 1950s he was an editor of Commonwealth.
He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, and has lectured there and at Yale, Johns Hopkins (SAIS), and has been Regents’ Lecturer and the University of California/San Diego.
He is married to the former Carolyn Cleary of Sydney, Australia, also a writer. They have two grown children, and make their home in Paris.