Alfred Kazin’s new book is one of those largescale thematic studies in which a prominent critic offers a summing-up of American literary culture. Both the book’s approach and its thesis are closely related to what used to be called “wisdom …
Where in the United States can we point to even a single well-planned communitarian experiment that has the virtues of being plural, open, secular, and democratic? When I survey the vast urban-industrial wasteland of contemporary America, I often ask myself …
Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, the worst crises any contemporary voter remembers. During his 12 years in office, moreover, Democrats and Republicans sorted themselves into the ideological pattern that still …
I’ve always been a collector, and when I was a kid I had what was undoubtedly the best collection of toy soldiers in the neighborhood. Boxes and boxes of them, occupying a sizable part of the basement. It was my …
Michael Walzer’s penetrating article on Camus in the Fall 1984 Dissent (“Commitment & Social Criticism: Camus’s Algerian War”), is a very convincing defense of that much-maligned writer’s position during the French-Algerian war, when he refused to ally himself, unlike the …
The international economic crisis that began in 1973-74 demonstrated the value of the welfare state everywhere in the West. It cushioned the shock for both the individual and the economy, and it helped avoid the abject misery and political extremism …
There are rumors afoot that Doctor Zhivago will finally be published in Moscow. A correspondent for the London Times has termed these rumors sensational. If, on the whole, rumors can be termed sensational, then we never had any shortage of …
What happened? Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by 59 percent to 41 percent in the popular vote, carrying a majority of every age group, of both sexes, and of every income class above $10,000 per year. Union members supported Mondale …
The 16 months of revolutionary euphoria in Poland—sandwiched between the Gdansk accords of August 31, 1980 that gave rise to the first independent trade unions in a Communist country and the proclamation of martial law on December 13, 1981—seem now …
What do unions do? They cause inflation, unemployment, low productivity, and inequality. Hence, what they do is bad. How? The high wages that unions impose cause inflation. The same high wages discourage employers from hiring workers, thereby causing unemployment. Union …
At the very beginning of this meticulous essay in intellectual history, Gertrude Himmelfarb employs Samuel Johnson and R. H. Tawney to make a point of importance, that attitudes toward the poor in England have changed less in the last two …
Frank Lentricchia has chosen a difficult problem for his new book, Criticism and Social Change. His ambition is to devise a Marxism responsive to the challenges posed for its theoretical foundations by the poststructuralist deconstructionist critical theories that have been …
Nothing in Antonioni’s Blow-Up is as memorable as the tennis game played without a ball while Thomas, the hero of the film, looks on. The camera tracks the mimes who play their ghostly game and when Thomas retrieves the imaginary …
For men and women of the democratic left, Albert Camus is an exemplary figure. His writing and his life, both of them enhanced, perhaps, by his early and senseless death, have taken on mythic proportions, so that we can plausibly …
Editors: I was impressed by Bob Kuttner’s article, “Jobs,” in the Winter 1984 Dissent. I was struck by the boldness and simplicity of the “procurement” approach to full employment and economic growth. Pointing first to the experience of World War II—when, …
