The recent, “third” wave of emigres from the Soviet Union has produced a wealth of valuable memoirs and works of fiction. But, except for a handful of economists, it has been singularly barren of significant contributions to our understanding of …
Thomas Sowell is a very good storyteller. But The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective is a poor book. It has the same strengths and weaknesses as the other three of his books I have read (Essays and …
President Reagan won a smashing victory. Yet despite the magnitude of the Republican triumph the Democratic party was not reduced to smithereens, even though, in some places, only small pieces of it remain, especially in the South and the West. …
Of postmortems there will be no end. What follows is less ambitious, a mere personal response written three days after the election. • It was a severe defeat. There are a few consoling features, most of all the failure of …
For a period of ten years, since the collapse of the “power-sharing” Executive under the impact of the Ulster Workers’ Strike of 1974, the problems of Northern Ireland have seemed virtually insoluble. Political opinion in the two communities in the North …
Left-wing literary people talk more these days about criticism than about fiction or poetry or plays. The statement sounds too flat to be true, and it is fair to ask what “left-wing” signifies in the context. I am using it …
As soon as Ronald Reagan became president, he set out to deliver private enterprise from the bondage of regulation. As the authors of A Season of Spoils explain, his thoughts on the matter were straightforward: Industrial production results in wealth …
With considerable help from Soviet troops as the war drew toward its end, the new [Titoist] regime found, in Belgrade, a permanent home at last. Our exhausted political leaders, famished for creature comforts, rushed to take advantage of the blessings …
The politics of the battered women’s movement brings together a number of vital concerns: the role of the state in intimate relations, feminist analyses of male violence and power, and the ways political activists and professional “social service providers” variously …
A specter is haunting American capitalism—the specter of unrestrained greed. So it appears from a story by Anne Crittenden in the New York Times (August 19, 1984). She reports the fears expressed by many academic and business luminaries ranging from …
Just when you thought you’d heard too many complex arguments about “comparable worth,” Michael Levin, Commentary‘s antifeminist-in-residence, comes along to simplify matters. It’s all a plot to destroy capitalism and establish socialism (Michael Levin, “Comparable Worth: The Feminist Road to …
Last May I attended a lecture by Laurent Fabius, then minister of industry and now prime minister, at one of the fairly exclusive left-wing private political clubs in Paris. The audience consisted largely of academics, civil servants, and political journalists. …
In the gloom of present-day politics, socialists may well lose themselves in nostalgic dreams of fraternity. We feel hemmed in by a world of self-interest, and we experience the daily weakening of those bonds of class and community that gave …
The task of Zionism is very nearly completed. That is to say, the problem that Zionism set out to address is just about solved. Soon we will be living in a post-Zionist era, and there will no longer be a …
When I was growing up in a small town outside of Detroit, I spent the usual amount of time playing war games. The one I remember best was a non-nuclear, domestic version of an imaginary “World War III,” pitting me …
