Our friend and comrade Irving Howe is dead. The world knew him as the leading intellectual of the American left, a voice (often, a voice in the wilderness) for democratic and socialist values. We knew him differently. He was our …
The veneration that surrounds the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt causes us to forget that, in his time, not everybody loved the man. To some of his opponents, he was downright evil. It was bad enough that this country squire …
In 1984, IBM, the largest and most advanced technology firm in the world, made after-tax profits of almost $7 billion. No other company in the world had ever made so much. Eight years later, in 1992, IBM lost $5 billion, …
It is sometimes said that Yugoslavia disintegrated because of its economic failures. Those who know a bit more talk about the failure of self-management. Still others say that social property was responsible for the failures. Some economists admit that economic …
Genocides are inconvenient for preoccupied statesmen, who have worries of their own. They happen at the wrong places and the wrong times. Those who argue that the destruction of Bosnia cannot be called an act of genocide ignore the fact …
More baloney is written and spoken around “employee involvement” (EI) than any other issue in American business. But it’s a mistake to dismiss this movement as “just baloney.” Twenty years of experimentation and more than a decade of careful academic …
Most accounts of modernity treat the advent of secularism as a central force in our world. From Weber’s study of the decline of sacralized societies to postmodern theories of the flattening of all value and affect, the modern is regarded …
We live in a time of diminished expectations. It’s not exactly a time of conservative dominance, although the dominant politics in some countries is an unenthusiastic conservatism. Nor is it a time of liberal dominance, although in the United States …
James Miller has provided us with a luminously intelligent biography of Michel Foucault. Miller, a former book and music critic for Newsweek and the author of an outstanding history of Students for a Democratic Society in its predogmatic phase (“Democracy …
Fifty years ago this winter, the Soviet government announced that a crime had been committed. The circumstances of the crime were misstated. The date of the crime was misreported. The victims of the crime were described as if they were …
As interest groups lobbied the Clinton transition team for cabinet appointments and Clinton groped for “diversity” in his cabinet, one group was noticeably silent—organized labor. Appointing Robert Reich as labor secretary was a good start, clearly linking labor’s fate to …
The great danger for the foreign and defense policies of the new Clinton administration lies in the “new” folks’ widespread temptation to try to act statesmanlike by producing a high degree of bipartisan continuity with Bush’s dismal policies. Les Aspin’s …
Clinton’s strategists—both white and black— were well aware of the need for any successful Democratic presidential candidate to win back a significant number of “Reagan Democrats” (upper working-class and new middle-class white ethnics). Helping Clinton to place the Reagan Democrats …
Bill Clinton won the presidency by promising the “most dramatic economic growth program since World War II.” In contrast to Bush, who offered no solutions to economic problems (he barely recognized any), Clinton emphasized the need to create millions of …
One of the marks of modern times is that masses of ordinary people have come to believe that their children’s lives could be a lot better than their own. Over the last two centuries, as the world has opened up, …
