German society is experiencing a level of turmoil unknown in its recent history. Although we do not believe that the history of the 1930s is repeating itself in Germany, there is an ominous backlash against minorities. Can German democracy combat …
The European currency system today is in a shambles, the expectations of a unified monetary structure shattered. The paradox is that on January 1, 1993, all restrictions on the movement of capital within the European community were supposed to be …
For a quarter century Robert Stone has been the American Baudelaire—poete maudit of Catholic mysticism and controlled substances, critic of modern folly, romantic pessimist in love with apocalypse. His five novels are all alike in structure and atmosphere, carrying two …
In January 1991, Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, was consumed by the bloodiest battles of a three-year civil war as government troops tried to fight off a rebel attack. By the end, the rebels had won, and most of Mogadishu …
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 …
Once upon a time in the East, there was film. Is it gone forever? Although dramatic changes have signaled the end of an era, the question is not an easy one. Final collapse is never the simple end of the …
Can the ideals of socialism survive the collapse of “actually existing socialism” and the current discrediting of the historic struggles against inequality? The very idea of social justice is threatened by the new anticollectivism, and the project of economic democracy …
One of the strongest implications of what we now know about the causes of endemic drug abuse is that the criminal-justice system’s effect on the drug crisis will inevitably be limited. That shouldn’t surprise us in the 1990s; it has, …
Willy Brandt grew up in the northern German city of Luebeck, immortalized in his fellow townsman Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Brandt’s Luebeck was much different, the Luebeck of the turbulence of the Weimar Republic and the coming of Nazism, of the …
What follows is something I feel uncomfortable writing, to some degree uncomfortable even thinking. Growing up on R.H. Tawney’s Equality, I have always believed that some form of egalitarianism-it may be hard to say just what form-is simply definitive of …
Jim Rule’s passionate attack on “tribalism” raises more questions than I can possibly address in a brief response. Since I by no means disagree entirely with what he writes, I want to begin by clearing up one misunderstanding. I do …
Western media have dubbed Czechoslovakia’s breakup a no-fault divorce. Now the two newly elected protagonists, Václav Klaus, the prime minister of the Czech republic and architect of Czechoslovakia’s economic transformation, and Vladimir Mečiar, a former communist, now a nationalist and …
No Marxist writing in English is more brilliant and learned than Perry Anderson. The publication of two collections of his essays in the aftermath, not only of the collapse of communism but also the electoral defeats of European social democracy, …
In the 1980s, democracy came to Latin America. Most countries created democratic institutions. Unparalleled opportunities seemed to open for the left. In Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, center-left governments were voted into office. Elsewhere (in Chile and El Salvador), Christian Democrats …
These two rather different voters seem to be voicing a question every voter answers at some level of thought or intuition: Whom can I trust? In the past this was mostly an implicit question that assumed that a satisfactory answer …
