The disruption caused by our chaotic medical system has reached such proportions that mainstream medical thought is beginning to call for a major revision of health services. As costs sprout upward the already limited care for low-income patients is further …
It is very difficult to address an audience after a film like the one we have just seen in this large theater, especially since this screening was attended by the few surviving former prisoners of Solovki, who have spoken to …
The subtitle of Professor Arno Mayer’s Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? is The “Final Solution” in History. Therein lies the major source of confusion and controversy in the book. Mayer does indeed attempt to set the “Judeocide” (a term …
More people are working at political theory in the academic world than ever before. The field is thriving, perhaps because there is so little serious thinking and arguing about politics outside the academy. The neoconservative think tanks of the 1970s …
Does socialism have a future? This question has been asked for almost two hundred years, whenever “socialism” as theory and movement reached a critical period. There can be little doubt that socialism, both as a movement and a theory, is …
The 1980s have been named “the decade of the humanities.” In institutions of higher learning all across the country a debate is underway as to what constitutes the “tradition,” the “canon” of literary, artistic, and philosophical works worth transmitting to …
A powerful torrent during the high rains, Rio Las Canas is a trickle of muddy water from October to May. It begins ten kilometers from the city center, carving its way north past volcanic slopes, eventually feeding into the large, …
I admired Bob Lekachman long before I met him. It was not only that we shared a political perspective. an interest in the history of economic thought. and a belief that economics is too important to be left to the …
James Madison, who understood democracy better than most then or since, would have been perplexed by Sanford Levinson’s piece in the summer issue that treated interpretations of the Constitution as mere matters of “taste.” Madison was quite sure what he …
Few periods of U.S. history have generated more debate than the Civil War era and its aftermath, what Eric Foner calls “America’s Unfinished Revolution.” And few periods have been subject to more intense investigation. The last two decades have seen …
Jürgen Habermas, one of Germany’s most important political and philosophical thinkers, gave an interview—conducted by Rainer Erd—to the Frankfurter Rundschau last March. Though it deals with specific events in West Germany, this interview should be of much interest to American …
The debate over what to teach—”the canon”, “Great Books,” core curriculum, Western civilization versus world civilization, the sins of Stanford, and so on—is one the least edifying debates of recent times. The problem is that it’s not a debate at …
At the end of 1988, UNICEF reported that half a million children had died during the year, in part because of cuts in social programs in the Third World. At the same time the World Bank estimated that in 1988 …
I heard this story several times in Stockholm: It was the final television debate before the 1982 parliamentary election. Olof Palme, then a former prime minister of Sweden, was about to speak. His Social Democratic Labor party (SAP)—out of office …
Since 1983 Breyten Breytenbach has been a naturalized French citizen, living in Paris, grateful for France’s “tolerance of political dissidents,” free to travel wherever he likes (though not to his homeland), free to write as he pleases, even “to castigate …
