Just how enlightening can even an enlightened despot be? That is the underlying question of Richard Lowenthal’s study of Communist policy toward the Third World—and a most welcome study it is. Lowenthal brings insight and erudition to an area in …
There is nothing that can put the Italian crisis into perspective quite like a few weeks in Italy itself, riding the rickety buses, coping with the ineffectual officialdom, bringing fresh linens to neglected patients in state hospitals, eating in desperate …
European Communist parties, for threescore years Stalin’s vanguard, seem to be discovering democracy. Few Americans have noticed and fewer still are willing to trust the change. With reason—and yet, if genuine, the change could mark the end of an era, …
European Communist parties, for threescore years Stalin’s vanguard, seem to be discovering democracy. Few Americans have noticed and fewer still are willing to trust the change. With reason—and yet, if genuine, the change could mark the end of an era, …
“Does the doctrine of original sin present a truth accessible to natural reason unaided by revelation, or a truth known from revelation alone?” Though it might sound strange in these pages, that, in his chosen idiom, is the question we …
The welfare state represents easily the most appealing program socialists have ever offered. Its success in alleviating both the specific costs and existential anxiety of industrialization, together with its proven compatibility with liberal democracy, make it an ideal basis for …
The future of socialism, I am convinced, depends more on its ability to provide a new conception of ownership than on its ability to redistribute property or secure social benefits. Those traditional aims retain importance even in a technologically mature …
The conference of exiled Czechoslovak democratic socialists at the Swiss Trade Union Center in Rotschuo this past September is yet another straw in the wind, serving notice that an easing of tensions between Washington and Moscow does not resolve the …
Collected Essays, by George Lichtheim. New York: Viking Press. 492 pp. George Lichtheim fitted ill the technological age whose coming he augured. He was, genuinely, a writer: one of the rare breed whose craft is saying forth, transforming unwieldy reality …
George Lichtheim fitted ill the technological age whose coming he augured. He was, genuinely, a writer: one of the rare breed whose craft is saying forth, transforming unwieldy reality into the freedom of the word. His occasional essays are the …
The future of socialism, I am convinced, depends more on its ability to provide a new conception of ownership than on its ability to redistribute property or secure social benefits. Those traditional aims retain importance even in a technologically mature …
On the Inner Crisis of Communist Society They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain—as the Kingston Trio used to sing—but in Russia they’re “building socialism.” There may be occasional tremors on the fringes of Comrade Brezhnev’s “socialist commonwealth,” requiring the …
Arthur London is a Czechoslovak Communist currently living in France. A veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the underground resistance, he held a post in the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs following the Communist seizure of power in 1948. Arrested …
Whatever is happening on campus, it is not a revolution in any recognizable sense. A revolution must have an independent socioeconomic base, and the “youth revolution” conspicuously lacks that. Its proponents do not constitute a class, definable in terms of …
With the publication of The Cowards, one of the major literary figures of our times is making a belated appearance in English. Josef Škvorecký has given East European readers a perspective of sanity in an insane world and a human perspective …
