Who does not know Marx’s lovely vision of life in a “communist society” where it will be possible “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, …
Since taking office last December, Spain’s new Socialist government has accorded foreign policy a central role. This signifies quite a turnabout. For, ever since the beginning of this century—excepting the Civil War of the 1930s—Spain has been rather a passive …
We’ve heard much in recent months about the long-awaited recovery of the U.S. economy. After four years of virtual stagnation, the economic news out of Washington has been decidedly upbeat since this spring. The stock market began to surge late …
A decade ago Tom Wolfe coined the term “radical chic” to describe what he regarded as a trendy identification of the wealthy with the poor. Wolfe’s 1970 essay focused on a benefit for the Black Panther party, and what he …
George Orwell’s 1984 was first published in 1949. By then many of its major themes had been anticipated, both in conservative literature and in the internal debates of the democratic left (and in such earlier antiutopian novels as Zamiatin’s We …
When Voltaire was asked why he kept a Bible on his night table, he replied: “You have to know your enemies.” I subscribe to Commentary on this Voltairean principle. As a result I got onto the mailing list of Midge …
You don’t have to be radical to see that a major disaster is building up in Central America. You only need some common sense. Nor do you need to be a subtle thinker to recognize that the architect of this …
Our age, which takes pride in the unprecedented scope, speed, and sophistication of its information, will probably go down in history as the Age of Credulity. This is a paradox only in appearance: actually there is a direct relationship that …
ROBERT MacNEIL: Won’t fresh wage demands by auto workers further weaken the price competitiveness of U.S. cars, given foreign wage rates? DOUGLAS FRASER: Well, I suppose if you’re just looking at wage increases in the abstract you could make that …
George Orwell’s 1984 was first published in 1949. By then many of its major themes had been anticipated, both in conservative litera- ture and in the internal debates of the demo- cratic left (and in such earlier antiutopian novels as …
Sid Caesar and his band of comic players (Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, and Imogene Coca, Nanette Fabray or Janet Blair) ruined Saturday-night business in theaters and movie houses. They burst onto TV in 1949, and continued through eight years of …
In places where life is reasonably ordered, the violence that rages in the Third World is masked by a propensity to integrate it in some favorite sequence of meaning. For those beholden to a vision of gradual progress, such violence …
William Barrett’s The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (Anchor/Doubleday, 1982) is a slippery and maddening book. It is an account of one man’s intellectual coming of age, and it has the qualities of a backward glance at a busy, crisscrossed …
The Catholic bishops have a nice sense of timing. Last November, just before the election, they released the second draft of a pastoral letter that called for a “halt” to the “testing, production and deployment of new strategic weapons” (Dissent, …
Persistent unemployment and pervasive mismatches between skills and job opportunities are symptoms of a basic problem: America’s labor force is not participating in the growing segments of the world economy. One out of every six jobs in the American economy …
