I used to be an admirer of Eugene McCarthy. While Senator from Minnesota, he was just about the first prominent figure in the political establishment to come out unambiguously against the Vietnam War. When he started to campaign for the …
The Conference on Critical Legal Studies (CLS) came into being in Madison, Wisconsin in 1977, during a meeting of legal scholars and practitioners dissatisfied with “mainstream” law. Since then “crits” have become one of the most important—and controversial—groups within the …
What follows may sometimes sound an irritated note. I am sorry about that, but have to admit that it is one of the objects of this essay to express a certain irritation with the terms in which some recent debates …
An earnest but ignorant undergraduate once wandered into a used book sale. Having some interest in political theory, he picked up a copy of Harold Laski’s The Rise of Liberalism: The Philosophy of a Business Civilization (1936). He didn’t know …
Since the appearance of François Furet’s Penser la Revolution Française in 1978, conventional wisdom concerning the French Revolution has fallen upon hard times. For quite some time such “conventional wisdom” has been left wing. In the nineteenth century the Revolution …
We live, my more literary minded friends tell me, in an age when irony is highly valued. So I suppose I should not be surprised that the continuing overbuilding of midtown Manhattan has taken a distinctly ironic twist. Still, there …
Somewhere around the middle of A Turn in the South, V. S. Naipaul compares his journey to a film shot in natural light—he is taking his trip as it comes, moving around without a thesis to prove or a desire …
Visiting Moscow after an eleven-year absence I was struck first by the freshness in the political atmosphere. The impact of glasnost is palpable: People talk in new ways, no longer tremulously, about the deplorable conditions in their country. The culture …
Chile’s plebiscite of October 1988 was a dramatic ending to fifteen painful years. Capitan General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, President of the Republic of Chile, notorious worldwide as a symbol of violence and repression, …
These have been stirring days. The popular uprising in China, begun by students and then taken up by hundreds of thousands of workers, farmers, and other citizens—who could witness this, however fleetingly, on television or read about it, however skimpily, …
One of the differences between the two political parties over the past ten years is that the Republican presidential candidates forget many things; the Democrats only one. On a range of questions small and large—the date of Pearl Harbor Day, …
In the 1920s critics of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) “pointed repeatedly to the same weaknesses: the emphasis on a craft structure, the ignoring of industrial unionism, jurisdictional disputes, inertia in organizing the unorganized, weak or tyrannical or corrupt …
Carlo Tresca’s life was exciting and romantic, the stuff of legends. The anarcho-syndicalist Italian-born labor agitator, journalist, and fierce foe of capitalism, Stalinism, and fascism was a stormy figure on the American left. He was so flamboyant in the American …
Marxist presence in Anglo-American political theory has grown in the last decade. Marxists have obtained prestigious positions at major universities and had their books issued by influential publishers. On some accounts, there is nothing good in this story—from the left, …
Read reservoir for pool and one of the West’s great environmental controversies begins to unsnarl. Read Two Forks Reservoir, a canyon-sized pool that Denver developers want to impound behind a giant dam on the South Platte River, a pool five …
