This is the bystander administration, the peripheral presidency. As the world is redefined, the United States has largely absented itself from the recreation. Washington, where government is less inclined to action than at any time since the 1920s, has virtually …
What happened to us between 1956 and 1989? Not much, only our time passed by. We did go back to see the more tepid and longer version of the same old show. Restrictions on our freedom of expression and movement …
I do not take the main issue to be “the canon.” The word itself is misleading as well as solemn, and I used article was something different: the relation of individual thought to the reading of good books. I still …
Communism has given socialism a bad name. Years of tyranny and brutality, now brought to an end almost everywhere by popular rebellions, have colored, perhaps permanently, our view of state-run economies and enforced egalitarianism. What has been called by some …
Stanley Fish, the Duke University Arts and Sciences professor of English, chair of the Duke English Department, distinguished professor of law, and self-described “academic leftist,” has just finished a dazzling performance. The overflow audience at Princeton has sat rapt as …
The Berlin Wall dismantled; religious ceremonies shown on Soviet television; the people of Romania overthrow Ceausescu; both Germanys announce plans to cut their armies by half over the next decade; European business plans to enter the huge new market. A …
Ten years from now, will there still be a Central Europe? Or will Europe’s center, suddenly reemerging as the Soviet tide recedes, find itself submerged once more by a Western tide? The end came so abruptly: what now? Amid the …
The rapid advance of democratization in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, still underway as I write, is surely one of the most extraordinary revolutions in the long history of democracy. Just as no one, to my knowledge, predicted the …
The specter of civil war is often raised in prognostications about the future of the Soviet Union, the great guessing game of the late twentieth century. When asked about the possibility, Andrei Sakharov could only gasp and quote Pushkin: “God …
The old disputes between right and left still stir emotions. In one of the first European parliaments, His Majesty’s opponents sat on his left (clearly, the worse side), while the supporters of Dynasty, Law, and Order were seated to his …
Vineland is a requiem for Pynchon’s sixties generation and the politics and culture it produced. It offers an America of those who have searched for self-transcendence along opposing ideological paths: the yearners for power and position who in the eighties …
We are saddened by the news that Hal Draper died this past January in Berkeley, California, at age seventy-five. Though our relations were strained by political differences—or differences in emphasis— we recall the many years of friendship as participants in …
Does anyone remember why the United States invaded Panama? The day after the invasion, President Bush supplied his reasons. “The goals of the United States,” he said, “have been to safeguard the lives of Americans, to defend democracy in Panama, …
On the morning of August 28, 1968, I left my Washington home and headed by car for the seaside resort of Rehoboth, Maryland. I remember starting out in high spirits: there was not a cloud in the sky, and I …
Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” is surely one of the genuine Great Ideas of history, both for its intrinsic intellectual content and for its durable influence on ideologies, politics, and public policies. The proposition that the alchemy of market competition transmutes …
