The Last Cold War Novel  

The Sykaos Papers by E. P. Thompson Pantheon Books, 1988, 490 pp., $19.95 An alien, Oi Paz, from the ultrarational, computer-directed society of the planet Oitar, crash-lands on Earth. Here he becomes a pawn in a cold war power struggle, …



Unorthodox Leftist  

Political and Social Writings by Cornelius Castoriadis, translated and edited by David Ames Curtis, 2 vols. University of Minnesota, 1988, 347 pp., and 362 pp., $14.95 each To open the pages of these two volumes is to breathe the stale …



McCarthyism Revisited  

Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective by Richard M. Fried Oxford University Press, 1990, 229 pp., $22.95 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy described McCarthyism as “Americanism with the gloves off,” but few students of this century’s second red scare …



Utopia Overturned  

The catastrophe of historical communism is, literally, before our eyes: the catastrophe of communism as a world movement, born from the Russian revolution, promising emancipation of the poor, the oppressed, the “wretched of the earth.” Its dissolution gathers speed, outdistancing …





Poland: The State and Markets  

In our thinking about the economic changes underway in Poland, we seem overly impressed by the wealth of the United States and Western Europe, where market forces rule (though not exclusively). We tend to forget that there are other countries …



Forgotten Greenville  

In November 1963 forty members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) gathered in the small Mississippi town of Greenville for three days of meetings. The result was a decision that would bring over one thousand volunteers—most of them white— …



Moral Philosophy and the Modern World  

Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation by Alan Wolfe University of California Press, 1989, 371 pp., $25.00 Adam Smith became professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1752. To hold such a professorship in that time …







Pragmatists and Politics  

The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism by Cornel West University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, 279 pp., Cornel West is a smart fellow who has written a difficult but challenging book. It is impossible to read The American …



Notes from the Left  

Now that the exhilaration of glasnost is wearing off and the problems of perestroika grow acute, there is a striking change of response to Gorbachev. Wise men shake their heads. They mutter, with crocodile regret or burbling delight, that he …



El Salvador: No Peace in Sight  

Guillermo Ungo is general secretary of the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) of El Salvador, a social democratic group. The interview below was conducted by Patrick Lacefield, national organizational director of Democratic Socialists of America. —EDS. PL: Can you evaluate the …



Poland Takes the Plunge  

During the season of its first flowering, at the outset of this decade, Halina Bortnowska, one of the foremost theorists of Polish Solidarity, characterized the movement as an expression of the country’s “subjectivity,” by which, she went on to explain, …



When G.M. Wrecked Flint  

Roger and Me, a radical documentary — marketed as a comedy —about the devastation of auto workers in Flint, Michigan, has, to everyone’s amazement, become a sleeper. At this moment it’s making pretty big bucks. Why? Go ask. Documentaries, let …