The Republican party under Ronald Reagan has shaped a fragile majority in presidential elections whose strength and vitality will be tested in 1988. In terms of partisan allegiance, the GOP has made striking gains over the past five years, reaching …
“Dodge Main”—the name of the huge Chrys- ler plant in Hamtramck—was often the first Eng- lish phrase learned by Poles arriving in Detroit. Over half a century it produced 14 million cars and helped integrate into mainstream society successive waves …
John Cooney’s study of the life and times of Cardinal Spellman inevitably points to the liberat- ing changes that have taken place within the Amer- ican Catholic church. The stand taken by the American bishops in their pastoral letters on …
It is now 37 years ago that the United States government decided James Kutcher was a security risk because of his membership in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party, then on the Attorney- General’s list of subversive organizations. He was fired …
Mainstream capitalist economics has become, among other things, a language. I do not mean simply that economists employ a professional jargon. How could they not? Between Economese and ordinary English there are more than differences of vocabulary; there are different …
The life of Afro-American intellectuals is governed by a web of contradictions. Simply put, there is this central contradiction: while black intellectuals work within the aesthetic limits of a pariah-like ethnicity, this ethnicity’s cultural forms are used and exploited—both intellectually …
In mid-October the Nicaraguan government announced a suspension of civil liberties, including the rights to free expression, free assembly, and privacy in the use of postal services. With these measures has come a new stringency in the censorship of the …
In a 1980 landmark case, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision, held that an independent association of faculty members at Yeshiva University in New York City, a private institution, was “managerial” and not entitled to the jurisdiction of …
Equality and justice are central to the idea of democratic socialism, yet their relationship to the organization of work and the division of labor has always been problematic. For Marx, transforming the process of production was a requirement for a …
To the many progressive reforms advocated in America shortly before World War I, some intellectuals could give partial sympathy but not whole-hearted commitment. Radical young intellectuals, fueled by Wells, Shaw, and Whitman, calling themselves socialists and Bergsonians, and scorning all …
To understand why we’ve arrived at our present impasse in dealing with crime, we must first reconsider the assumptions that have guided the dominant policies on crime in America through most of the past decade. This means taking a hard …
By now there is a large literature available in English on the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and its aftermath. Nevertheless, Milan Simecka’s The Restoration of Order, written eight years ago and circulated by Czechoslovakia’s Samizdat, has only recently been translated …
Michael Piore and Charles Sabel have written a book that is both enormously insightful and deeply irritating. These two qualities are so tightly intertwined that it is not a question of directing readers to the good parts and warning them …
This biography of Ilya Ehrenburg is the first serious attempt to assess the career of one of the most controversial men of our century. A writer and journalist by profession, Ehrenburg was widely regarded during the Stalin years as Russia’s …
Questions about corporate takeovers become more and more insistent. There is a fear that takeovers sap America’s competitive strength and contribute to an unhealthy obsession with short-term growth. While defenders of takeovers have taken the position that few negative effects …
