Marshall Sahlins has resigned from the National Academy of Sciences in political and academic protest. His motivations lead to some big questions: What is anthropology? What is it for? And what does it mean to be human?
Much of what we now take for granted as common sense was once espoused by people who often were widely considered left-wing radicals.
Herman Benson’s Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers
“In just six months we’ve changed the labor movement,” newly elected AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney told the labor federation’s convention delegates last October. “Now we’re going to change America.” It was the bravado of victory speeches, to be sure, …
After fifteen years in the trenches, one union organizer summed up management’s present attitude toward unions with tongue in cheek: “They’re mean to us.” As a description of the past decade, that’s a grand understatement. A great many employers in …
The soot-darkened skies and fouled waters of Eastern Europe have given apologists for laissez-faire capitalism a new rallying cry: the “free market,” far from being nature’s enemy, is the environment’s savior. Some environmentalists have argued that there is no fundamental …
In the eighties, the idea of the market triumphed. From Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s Britain to the crumbling economies of the Soviet bloc, the “market” became a mantra for all occasions. Chanted long enough it would bring freedom, choice, prosperity, …
In the 1920s critics of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) “pointed repeatedly to the same weaknesses: the emphasis on a craft structure, the ignoring of industrial unionism, jurisdictional disputes, inertia in organizing the unorganized, weak or tyrannical or corrupt …
The deep farm crisis of recent years has made the urban majority aware of anguish in the countryside, even if the world of modern farming—and even more of farm policy—is so remote that it is hard for outsiders to grasp. …
