The bilateral and multilateral negotiations to reduce the arsenals of death do not give much ground for hope. Reykjavik and its aftermath are a slender thread on which to hang the framework of peace. The best that can be anticipated …
Richard Powers’s valuable and well-balanced biography of Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover reminds us of the two foremost themes that any analysis of the FBI’s role in twentieth-century American politics must confront: how the Bureau’s biases generally …
Forty years ago Simone de Beauvoir sat in front of a blank sheet of paper at the Cafe des Deux Magots, on the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris, wanting to write about herself: I realized that the first question to …
“I keep thinking,” Michael Herr writes in Dispatches, “about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. . . . We’d all seen too many …
Georg Lukács liked to say that Marxism is the Himalayas of thought. But, he warned, a hare atop the Himalayas ought not to imagine himself taller than an elephant in the valley below. The most fertile Marxist mind of our …
The past—to use a phrase of Marx—”weighs like a nightmare” on the Soviet Union of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. He is not the first Soviet leader to attempt to escape from the nightmare of Stalinism in order to make a radical …
The term “market socialism” has no unique reference. It is a blanket term that has emerged to cover all versions of socialism in which markets are given a significant role to play. If there is any community of view among …
The U.S. news media, which seem to take their intellectual inspiration from People magazine, have focused almost exclusively on Corazon Aquino in their coverage of the Philippines. But though her ascension to the presidency really was a wonderful event, the …
How times have changed. Many years ago Marx and Engels concluded their Manifesto with the defiant affirmation: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained. .. . ” But now, …
This spring my book Politics and the Novel was reissued in paperback by New American Library. The publisher asked me to “bring it up to date” by discussing, however briefly, political fiction written since the Second World War. A formidable …
In Washington, the Tower Commission report has been analyzed mainly as an investigation of a policy. But there is another interesting way to view the report. Even though Ronald Reagan didn’t request it, the commission didn’t intend it, and the …
For much of the post-World War II period, the United States routinely had rates of unemployment higher than those in Western Europe. This pattern has been reversed in the 1980s; in 1984, the U.S. suffered with 7.4 percent unemployment: hardly …
The liberal tradition has always been ambivalent toward government. On the one hand, liberal theorists have usually deemed some form of civil government necessary to the security of life and property. In Locke’s view, only the promulgation and enforcement of …
Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep …
There have been millions upon millions of refugees. Most of them have received considerable media attention, even where concrete support (food, decent living conditions) was meager and inadequate. One group of refugees, perhaps because they “merely” numbered in the tens …
