With the election of Bill Clinton, the war in Vietnam ended—finally. George Bush sought to make it a campaign issue by talking about Clinton’s draft record, yet Americans pronounced such matters irrelevant to their concerns—economic concerns, which are not so …
The resurgence of nationalism after the collapse of communism startled many observers in the West. What could have been more stark than the contrast between Western and Eastern Europe? As the European Community sought new modes of integration, nationalist virulence …
Can we speak of a historical phenomenon called Stalinism? One is tempted to a brusque riposte: the answer is self-evident to millions of its victims. But this would avoid the issue raised by the question, which is whether the Stalinshchina …
There are two oddities to George Bush’s “New World Order”: (1) he didn’t create it and (2) it doesn’t exist. There is a new flux, but not a new order in the world. Its sources, all of which preceded the …
After the smart bombs, America needs an intelligent agenda. For over a decade, Americans have heard that “big” government ruins everything. The public weal—everything save flag waving and arresting flag burners—is best left to private enterprise. Yet when the government …
Why go beyond an advanced welfare state—beyond what Robert Heilbroner calls “real but slightly imaginary” Sweden? How would the passage from welfare state to “socialism” be manifest? To create a more democratic society. By expanding substantive, that is, social and …
Europe is today a new-old world. It is a continent in transitions that until recently were deemed inconceivable. Cold warriors, confident in their rigid concepts, told us not long ago that a declining Western Europe, losing its backbone and faced …
Hungary today is a land of possibilities, perils, and unpredictability. In the past year, the ruling (Communist) Hungarian Socialist Workers party (HSWP) reluctantly recognized that ineffective leadership and lack of legitimacy had rendered it increasingly incapable of coping with the …
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” This famous line, spoken by O’Brien to the battered Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, embodies the fear so many felt in the aftermath of …
The late French philosopher is squatting in the corridor. He is gazing, with his one good eye, through a keyhole out at the world. Perched forward, squinting, he is aware solely of the aperture and what he sees through it; …
Did Klaus Barbie receive the defense he deserved? Before his trial in Lyon last summer for war crimes fades entirely into history, the question ought to be posed. One imagines that the cynical old Nazi was aware that his acquittal …
Georg Lukács liked to say that Marxism is the Himalayas of thought. But, he warned, a hare atop the Himalayas ought not to imagine himself taller than an elephant in the valley below. The most fertile Marxist mind of our …
In a celebrated passage of “The Economic Ethic of World Religions,” Max Weber remarked that often, “like switchmen,” the “world images” created by ideas have “determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.” In …
In 1949, a few years after his return to Budapest following a quarter of a century’s exile, Georg Lukacs found himself under vigorous attack by the press and the party hierarchs who accused him, among other things, of “revisionism” and …
Surveying the condition of international socialism two decades after it was sundered by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer wrote of the need to unite “the ethos of democratic socialism and the pathos of revolutionary …
