Spring 2024

When Voltaire was asked why he kept a Bible on his night table, he replied: “You have to know your enemies.” I subscribe to Commentary on this Voltairean principle. As a result I got onto the mailing list of Midge …

After Francois Mitterrand was elected president of France in May 1981, and the legislative elections of June 1981 gave the Socialist party a solid majority in the National Assembly, a sense of euphoria spread through the French left, both inside …

When Rose Laub Coser and I wrote about the Jonestown tragedy (in Dissent, Spring 1979), the sources of our interpretation were limited to journalistic accounts. I was therefore eager to turn to these two books hoping that, with the distance …

When 33 Haitians, whose frail craft had capsized, drowned and were washed ashore on Florida beaches last November while 34 others managed to swim ashore, what do you suppose agitated some government officials, apart from their declared policy of preventing …

Neither Eisenhower nor Nixon nor Ford tried to tamper with the welfare state initiated by Roosevelt. In fact, all of them extended it to a significant extent. Now, almost 50 years after its inception, the growth of the welfare state …

Shortly before the elections, Israeli television interviewed a few men and women in the street as to their views of the candidates. Said one of them, “I don’t know why the difference between them matters—after all they are both Jews.” …

Billington’s previous book, his masterful cultural history of Russia, The Icon and the Axe, was acclaimed as a major departure in the interpretation of Russian culture. His present work, which aims to trace the origins of modern revolutionary faith and …

Midge Decter has become Commentary‘s specialist in baiting minorities. Some years ago she wrote a book studded with venomous attacks against liberated women. More recently she wrote about a race riot in New York City and the attendant looting in …

In the last two years Lyndon LaRouche and his followers have published articles claiming that the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust never happened, that international Zionism controls part of the drug traffic in America, that the B’nai …

E. P. Thompson is best known as the social historian whose magisterial The Making of the English Working Class has had an enduring impact on the writing of labor history on both sides of the Atlantic. His biography of William …

Barrington Moore has come a long way since he published his monumental study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, over a decade ago and since he collaborated with Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Wolff in 1965 on an unfortunate book …

A specter is haunting Irving Kristol—the specter of The New Class. It consists of “some millions of people whom liberal capitalism has sent to college in order to help manage its affluent, highly technological, mildly paternalistic `post-industrial society.” These educators, …