Henry Pachter was both a historical scholar who combined an unusual breadth of horizon with deep originality of thought, and a profoundly engaged, lifelong socialist. It is therefore fitting that this second collection of his essays to appear after his …
In recent years, it has become commonplace in the Western democracies to speak of a crisis of the “social democratic consensus.” What is meant is not merely a crisis in terms of the influence and self-confidence of the social democratic …
This paper aims neither at a comparative documentary study of successive party programs adopted by the governing, or potentially governing, social democratic parties of Northern and Central Europe, nor at a history, however sketchy, of the policies pursued by each …
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, by Daniel Bell. New York: Basic Books. 282 pp. The first volume of Daniel Bell’s sociological diagnosis of our time—The Coming of Post-Industrial Society—was described as “a venture in social forecasting”: it concentrated on tendencies …
The history of World Communism, conceived as a united movement with a common doctrine and strategy formulated from a single center, is at an end. One hundred years after the foundation of the First International and fifty years after Lenin …
How far are the political decisions of the Soviet leaders influenced by their belief in an official ideology—and how far are they empirical responses to objective conflcts of interest, to real situations of power, which are only expressed in ideological …
If I had to select items of twentieth-century evidence to be found one day by future historians and archaeologists, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the protocols of the Moscow trials would be high on my list. Twentieth-century man has …
“Nero, too, was a product of his epoch. Yet after he perished his statues were smashed and his name was scraped off everything. The vengeance of history is more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary. I …
