In the Swedish general elections of 1976 the ruling Social Democrats were defeated after 44 years in government. In that election campaign the electorate was concerned with two important new issues that had never before been on the agenda: first, …
“The learned and imaginative life is a way of living and is not an article of commerce,” wrote the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in 1929. Fifty years later, in commending an industrial associates program to the Yale faculty, A. Bartlett …
At the end of October 1981, I delivered a lecture at one of the higher educational institutions in southeastern Poland. When I finished, a young man rose to ask a question that had no relation to the subject of my …
It has been 40 years since Carlo Tresca was gunned down on the streets of New York, at 5th Avenue and 15th Street (January 11, 1943). Who killed him? Mussolini’s Fascists? The Stalinists? Mafioso hirelings working for either (Genovese hit …
A central problem of the American economy has been its cyclical volatility. Swings of widening magnitude have dogged it since the mid-1960s. Industrial production—to take but one indicator— fell 12 percent in 1981-82, somewhat less than in 1974-75, but it …
Retiring Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm bowed out of central Brooklyn politics this winter for the halls of Mount Holyoke College, leaving behind the constituency of American and West Indian blacks whose “mother of the community” she’d been through 14 years of …
Classical Greek democracy was the social organization of the free “men” (not women) of a city-state (polls), who had either enough leisure to occupy themselves with matters of common interest or—in the late Athenian democracy— were compensated for their loss …
What has been called Eastern Europe since the end of World War II is a political, not a geographical, phenomenon. Geographically it comprises countries that have always been considered part of Central Europe (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland), as well as countries …
In 1957 Norman Podhoretz participated in a symposium on “The Young Generation of U.S. Intellectuals.” He was 27 years old, already an editor of Commentary. He observed that his generation, which came of age in the Cold War, “never had …
Imaginings of a utopian, or utopian socialist, future can be traced from chapters in Scripture to present-day works. The 19th century was particularly fruitful in this respect; it not only produced works of literary imagination but abounded in significant, organized …
A tall, craggy, white-bearded gentleman who looks like and is the small-town publisher of a weekly newspaper has an intriguing comment about his past. Born of an antebellum family in Mississippi, his past includes Phi Beta Kappa at Columbia University; …
An intriguing question remains among those raised by the last election, namely, how much did the Catholic bishops’ support for a nuclear freeze, released in draft form just a few days before the voting, influence the outcome in those eight …
We are now in the middle of the battle over the 1984 budget. The president is browbeating us to “stay the course”; we have to derail him. Our job is not only to restore the services he would cut but …
When President Reagan dedicated the flight of the space shuttle to the Afghan resistance, he was displaying once again his intuitive talent for political cabaret. The Reagan administration’s choice to support a “liberation movement” already provides a clue that something …
Almost exactly a century ago, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor presented what is probably the most trenchant argument ever made against democratic socialism. By democratic socialism I mean the demand that men should come together to create a new kind of community, …
