Remembering Irving Howe  

It is very difficult to write about someone much celebrated, much admired, much mourned. I will content myself with this small anecdote. A good friend was visiting one day when the mail came, bringing a letter from Irving in which …



The Corporation in America  

In November 1932, in the pit of the Great Depression and within a week of Franklin Roosevelt’s election, Macmillan published Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property. The book quickly became a classic referent …





The Sources of American Decline  

“It is not a correct deduction from the Principles of Economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest.” Thus John Maynard Keynes in an essay written in 1926 whose title Robert Kuttner has borrowed for this stunning excoriation …





A Vision of Socialism  

“Socialism,” writes Michael Harrington, “is the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face in the twenty-first century. Socialism?” he asks in the same breath: “How can a nostalgic irrelevance be the …



Vision and Ideology  

What lies behind the veil of economics? Vision and ideology. What does the complicated subject matter of economic analysis conceal from view? Our deep-lying, perhaps unanalyzable notions concerning human nature, history, and the like; and the various disguises by which …



Of Power and Freedom  

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, both professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, are scholars writing from the perspective of what might be called “liberated Marxism,” a perspective that begins from Marx’s penetrating analysis of capitalism, but …



The State and Capitalism  

Like all social formations, capitalism is not merely a Chinese puzzle in which all elements are of equal importance in locking together the whole. In capitalism as in other regimes, a central organizing principle and its institutions influence all aspects …







Galbraith’s Progress  

Economics and the Public Purpose, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Boston: Houghton Miflin. 334 pp. I hope I will be forgiven if I begin a discussion of John Kenneth Galbraith’s latest and most important book with a small lecture. The subject …