The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age by E.P. Thompson The New Press, 1997 225 pp. $25 This posthumous collection of essays and reviews by E.P. Thompson makes a companion to the last book he completed, Witness against the Beast—a …
Modern democracy has long drawn much of its moral energy from the idea of a career open to talents, an idea that depends on a shared conception of merit. I take it that merit is always in one sense a …
To pursue a steady commitment to freedom of speech is a difficult choice. It entails a suppression of the desire to silence or somehow restrict the opinions of people with whom you disagree, a decision to allow their speech in …
In all the discussion of sending the children of welfare mothers to orphanages, it seems to have escaped attention that an immoral use of the English language is involved. An orphan has never meant anything but a child whose parents …
Hume said that absolute monarchy was “the easiest death, the true Euthanasia, of the British constitution.” I offer some notes and questions about a line of political apologetics that if pursued far would lead to the euthanasia of liberal society. …
Allard Lowenstein was a liberal insurgent at the heart of the civil rights protests and the antiwar protests of the sixties. His gift was for organizing and speaking, and he had command of the great ability a reformer needs—of turning …
I met Irving Howe in 1970; I had written a review of a book about campus radicals and sent it unsolicited to Dissent; a few days later a postcard came back that was not a rejection, not a formal letter …
One of the great British scholars of the twentieth century, R. G. Collingwood is chiefly remembered today as the author of three books: The Idea of History, The Idea of Nature, and The Principles of Art. All are remarkable works …
I do not take the main issue to be “the canon.” The word itself is misleading as well as solemn, and I used article was something different: the relation of individual thought to the reading of good books. I still …
Michael Harrington had two qualities of the greatly good—patience, and an almost total freedom from vanity. A political worker by calling, he was also, irrepressibly, a quick-witted man, who could startle himself (in the middle of some careful analysis of …
Two distinct topics have been involved in the recent debate about the future of the humanities, and the worst failure of the debate is that it hardly seems to notice the distinction. The topics in question are the traditional study …
This academic year, the New York Times Magazine observed the end of spring term with an article (“The Battle of the Books,” June 5) on the current anticanonical fashion in teaching literature. The Magazine has taken a noticeable interest in …
A clever and capable man, Michael Dukakis is the kind of politician the Democrats once could produce with ease from year to year. He happens to be the first of his kind whom they have found to run for president …
Over the past twenty-two months, almost since the day of President Reagan’s second inauguration, the foreign policy of the United States has been controlled by a handful of military officers and their pals: freelance spies, itinerant jobbers from think tanks, …
Modern conservatives since Edmund Burke have held a difficult position, at least in part because of the distinctiveness of their view. They defend the things of the past, and are inclined to respect history; and yet, it is a foregone …
