Christopher Lasch’s earliest books were about radical intellectuals in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and the movements of the left they supported. Lasch was critical of these movements and their intellectual allies for failing to maintain a consistent and realistic …
In the last half of the 1980s questions began to be raised about income and wages in the U.S. economy. Who was benefiting from Reaganomics? Was the economy producing a disproportionate number of low-wage jobs? Was the middle class shrinking? …
Who among us would insist that our children repeat the miseries—real or imagined—of our childhoods? Why, then, do we tolerate other people’s children suffering more than most of us will ever do in a lifetime? The answers lie in a …
The possible arrival of a new social class evokes grand blasts of imagery. Across history’s bookish stage roll bourgeois Christian soldiers, boxcars of workers (trailing haunting specters), limos carrying commissars of the nomenklatura, electricians in white coats (breathing soul into …
Thomas Roberts, Camden, New Jersey’s affable director of economic redevelopment, used to be optimistic about bringing his moribund waterfront city back to life. “But then I saw Roger & Me,” he says, “and I realized it would not be an …
Think of the statistician’s bell curve and you have the shape of public opinion today. At one tail are antiwar partisans for whom the Gulf War is a continuation of Vietnam, while at the other tail is an equally automatic …
Half a dozen years ago Americans rediscovered the failure of their public schools. A series of governmental and foundation reports warned that the mediocrity of elementary and secondary school education endangered America’s competitiveness in the global economy. There was little …
This war is a catastrophe, all the more so for being avoidable. There was—there remains— another way to stop Saddam Hussein: the combination of sanctions and genuinely multilateral enforcement. Now the unintended and half-intended consequences are spilling out like Kuwait’s …
Social decline? Social decay? Social breakdown? We wondered which of these phrases, none of them “scientific” in nature, would best apply to the current situation in the United States. Social decline—too mild. Social decay—that suggests a process too slow. Social …
Among the economic changes wrought by the 1980s has been a new fiscal relationship between the federal government, on one hand, and the state and local governments, on the other. Ronald Reagan heralded the “New Federalism,” which was supposed to …
They seemed at first like an apt symbol: a tragic embodiment of all that needed fixing in America. Dirt poor, out of work, without a safety net, the pitiful army of the “homeless” pricked the country’s conscience. Like blacks in …
The news from the USSR is ominous. The Soviet Interior ministry has attacked institutions of representative government in Lithuania and Latvia; Estonia waits nervously. Unarmed supporters of the elected governments of these republics have been shot or crushed under tanks. …
In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe devotes a single passage to the way historical memory influences a certain kind of modern liberal sensibility. Wolfe’s Bronx assistant district attorney, Kramer, searching his political conscience, stumbles on the word “socialist” …
Democracy and Its Critics is a rigorous summary of the life work of one of America’s premier political scientists. It is also a timely antidote to the right’s equation of democracy with the “freedom” of an unrestrained capitalist market. In …
One of the great British scholars of the twentieth century, R. G. Collingwood is chiefly remembered today as the author of three books: The Idea of History, The Idea of Nature, and The Principles of Art. All are remarkable works …
