“Labor now has become a commodity, wealth capital, and the natural order of things is entirely reversed . . . capital and labor stand opposed,” stated a labor newspaper, the Awl, written for the shoemakers of Lynn and surrounding towns …
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, …
The Fall of the Public Man, by Richard Sennett. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 373 pp. Some years ago in a much discussed book, The Politics of Authenticity, Marshall Berman argued for a politics of radical individualism, advocating the liberation …
Utopia and Revolution, by Melvin J. Lasky. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 726 pp. Condorcet, the great exemplar and martyr of the French Revolution, wrote under the shadow of death that “the friend of humanity can enjoy unmixed pleasure …
The Revolutionary Ascetic: Evolution of a Political Type, by Bruce Mazlish. New York: Basic Books. 261 pp. Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, by Herbert G. Gutman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 343 pp. Recoiling from the lack of …
This report was completed in the middle of June and is based on a visit to Spain in May and early June. Early in July, the King dismissed the previous Prime Minister, and the new Prime Minister’s cabinet did not …
A new intellectual type has risen on the American scene, the celebrity intellectual. He addresses a semieducated mass public that makes little claim to expert knowledge or refined taste, and that adheres to no commonly shared cultural standards. The celebrity …
Writing these pages in Europe allows me to look at the problem of American poverty in a way I might not have chosen had I written in America. Visiting the slums of Naples and North Africa or traveling through the Sicilian …
On the way to an international convention at Varna, Bulgaria, my wife and I recently stopped in a small town in Bulgaria. The only decent restaurant being crowded, the waiter directed us to a large table where seven or eight …
The theater of the absurd is now being enacted on the public scene. Letters recently sent to a number of corporations which were subsequently bombed stated that the bomb throwers were full of loving care for mankind and therefore felt …
Colonel Joseph Bellas is probably one of those ordinary officers not likely to be remembered in the annals of warfare, but he recently delivered himself of a statement that is unforgettable. The Colonel is in command of a hospital in …
In last year’s U.S. pavillion at the Montreal World’s Fair I noticed a sign reading: Hall of the Great Society —Emergency Exit. Let’s take that exit right now! After the obscene happening at Chicago that went by the name of Democratic …
Professor Berman’s earlier A Reader’s Guide to Shakespeare’s Plays may have been helpful. I wouldn’t know. His present guide to the intellectual life of the sixties, however, is not of much use. Both title and subtitle are misleading. This is not …
Almost half of the population of the United States is now under twenty-five years of age. This unprecedented demographic fact is well on the way toward changing completely the texture of American politics, as the McCarthy campaign has shown in …
“The emancipation of the working class is the work of the working class itself,” wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. One of the tragic paradoxes of the Marxist movement has been that impatient revolutionaries—appalled by the sluggishness of history …
