The Short American Century: A Postmortem Edited by Andrew Bacevich Harvard University Press, 2012, 287 pp. The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by the superiority in applying organized …
Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch by Eric Miller Eerdmans, 2010, 394 pp. $32 IN 1994, Christopher Lasch died at the age of sixty-one, an inestimable loss to all those interested in American politics and culture. …
After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order by Emmanuel Todd and Socialist register 2004: The New Imperial Challenge
If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? by G. A. Cohen Harvard University Press, 2000, 233 pp., $35 Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard Rorty Penguin Books, 2000, 288 pp., $13.95 W.H. Auden said that “poetry makes …
Don’t Think, Smile: Notes on a Decade of Denial by Ellen Willis Beacon Press, 192 pp., $24 For thirty years, in a wide arc from the Village Voice and Social Text to the New Yorker and Mirabella, Ellen Willis has …
The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy by Russell Jacoby Basic Books, 1999 ,236 pp., $26 “If you can’t say anything nice,” my mother used to admonish, “don’t say anything at all.” Presumably Russell Jacoby’s …
In “Literature and Science” (1883), a lecture delivered in America during the high noon of the Victorian culture wars, Matthew Arnold defended the study of Greek against utilitarian educational reformers and a newly assertive commercial class. “Literature may perhaps be …
Economic Justice by Stephen Nathanson Prentice Hall, 1998 144 pp $19.95 Everyone loves a good argument; and as we know from the dialogues of Plato, few questions are more likely to get an argument going than “What is justice?” In …
The first two Partisan Review anthologies, published in 1946 and 1953 and now out of print, were of an almost unbelievable richness. The contributors whose names began with “A” were Lionel Abel, James Agee, Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, Hannah Arendt, …
‘Lord, enlighten thou our enemies,’ should be the prayer of every true reformer,” wrote Mill in his essay on Coleridge. “Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger …
The history of modem society, from one point of view,” Christopher Lasch observed in Haven in a Heartless World, “is the assertion of social control over activities once left to individuals and their families.” This, at any rate, is the …
From time immemorial the prime agency of individual and social reproduction has been inertia, the biological form of which is instinct and the cultural form, tradition. That is to say, things were done because they had been done before— an …
Why do we still care about the New York Intellectuals? Partly, perhaps, because they embodied, conceivably for the last time in American history, a venerable modern ideal, practiced also by the philosophes and praised by Goethe and Marx: vielseitigkeit or …
The most famous European writer of the first half of the twentieth century was not Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Mann, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Rilke, Lawrence, Brecht, Gide, or Pasternak. In fact, if one could somehow quantify literary celebrity, I suspect these …
The responsibility of intellectuals includes not only “a ruthless criticism of all things existing” (Marx), which is what most people on the left are usually occupied with, but also the imagination of alternatives. Not many writers have made lasting contributions …
