This may seem an odd time to be thinking about socialism in the 1990s and in the West. The collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe has been so much the most interesting political event of the 1980s, and …
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. Those old enough to have been students in 1960 remember the shock waves it caused. As one writer “under thirty” put it, at last someone from the older …
Martin Kilson is arguing with a phantom of his own making. Yet I am grateful for his letter because it so vividly illustrates the distorting powers of the enemy-memory that I discussed in my essay. One will note in his …
Glut is the four-letter word that has plagued capitalism from the moment of its birth. It is an endemic disease that turns epidemic when ignored. It started several centuries ago in Europe. Today it is global, threatening the economic and …
A new genre of economic analysis chronicles the slow decay of key American industries. “There was a time,” this sort of tale begins, “when the United States was an example for the rest of the world. The (fill in the …
In The Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat and Renewal by Richard Nixon Simon and Schuster, 1990, $21.95 Richard Nixon and His America by Herbert S. Parmet Little, Brown, 1990, $24.95 We live, apparently, in a time of the composure …
Shortly before Christmas, on my way to Lauubeck from Gauottingen, I was changing trains in Hamburg when a young man approached me, practically cornered me, and called me a traitor to the fatherland. He left me standing there with the …
The media business operates with a pair of avowed purposes—to provide a public service and to make money. As a result, mixed messages are typical. America’s three major newsweeklies, for instance, have published occasional articles critical of the tobacco habit. …
Readers of the financial pages are familiar with resignations or firings (“has left to pursue other interests”). Nothing remarkable here, as the continual movement of people in and out of jobs is a capitalist fact of life. It must have …
History, said Oswald Spengler, is destiny. Combined with myth, the taproot of emotion, it becomes the fate of a people. Was destiny the foundation of the sonderweg, the “special path” to modernity that joined the powerful drive of Prussia with …
Returning to Warsaw after a lapse of nine years, a visitor expects visual changes as dramatic as the political. That expectation is quickly dashed. The Polish capital simply looks more tired than ever, with its heartbreaking Stalinist architecture, mercifully relieved …
There seems to be a connection, historical and perhaps even logical, between metaphysics and morality; that is, between views about the nature of being or knowledge and views about justice and the good. A vague sense (which is surely all …
The cold war is over. There is simply no rationale for a defense budget of the size now contemplated by the Bush administration. One need not be an expert in military strategy or international affairs to understand that spending anywhere …
The following study (that is, etude) was originally submitted under the title “Strategies of Subversion: Discourse, Desire, and The Other in ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ “—Ens. The hegemonic discourse of postmodernity valorizes modes of expressive and “aesthetic” praxis which preclude any dialogic …
All too often the impression conveyed by recent coverage of Eastern Europe’s revolutions is that the collapse of totalitarianism has already ushered in an era of “capitalism triumphant.” Stories of nascent entrepreneurial spirit sweeping the region saturate the press while …
