In his essay “Tenure Trouble” (Dissent, Winter 1998), Jon Wiener presents much too narrow a view of the rising opposition to academic tenure, its rationale, and causes. Following Wiener’s precedent, let me disclose that I was a tenured faculty member …
Nearly twenty-five years ago I published in Dissent (Winter 1974) a theory of a left/right rhythm in democratic politics—a rhythm that over time produces a leftward drift because conservative administrations on returning to power tend not to reverse the reforms …
The year 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan, and the creation of the United Nations. The founding of Commentary in the same year hardly ranked with …
James Wilson contends that there is a universally human moral sense that makes possible the existence of stable human ‘societies. He divides his moral sense into four parts: sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.Wilson thinks that many prevailing doctrines in and …
In September 1945 Rose Coser and I were new graduate students in the Department of Sociology at Columbia. She was from the beginning a vivid and forceful presence who used to sit in the front of Robert K. Merton’s classes …
The Fall 1993 issue of Partisan Review was entirely filled by a symposium on “The Politics of Political Correctness” to which twenty-seven people, most of them professors, contributed. Unlike several famous earlier PR symposia, this one can hardly be said …
I first met Irving in Princeton in 1949 when we were both still in our twenties. We met through the group or network that nearly twenty years later he christened the “New York Intellectuals.” He was already moving to the …
Christopher Lasch’s earliest books were about radical intellectuals in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and the movements of the left they supported. Lasch was critical of these movements and their intellectual allies for failing to maintain a consistent and realistic …
Over forty years have passed since the beginnings of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War. By the standards of modern history, that is a fairly long time. We …
Philosophers of social science have identified description, explanation, and evaluation as three distinct ways of assessing any historical phenomenon. If this triad is applied to Ellen Schrecker’s study of McCarthyism and American higher education, she earns high if not quite …
Reagan’s reelection by a landslide fully conformed to the well-established precedent that incumbent presidents win new terms when relative peace abroad and prosperity at home prevail. Of 13 incumbents before him who ran for election in this century, only four …
Theodore Draper contends that his title, though apparently an oxymoron, is meant to indicate the intermediate status of his essays between journalism, which deals with immediate events, and traditional history, which waits to assess them until they have indisputably acquired …
I want to argue three propositions about the social phenomenon called the “new class”: (1) it may be a class, but it is not new; (2) it may be new, but it is not a class; (3) it may be …
The term “cold war” has long referred to American-Soviet relations since the Second World War, but beyond that there has been little consistency in its usage, even on how to set it in type. When capitalized, “the Cold War” usually …
I do not recall a time when the prospects for the left in America have looked quite so dim. By “the left,” I mean both the relatively small group of intellectuals and perpetual activists who have been responsive to Marxian …
