The longevity of the East European Communist systems—they have lasted over 35 years—poses a serious question: what are the sources of social stability and legitimacy in these societies? In the late ’40s and early ’50s most specialists assumed that, except …
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 …
May 15-20. Dallas. No, not Dallas, a soap opera that holds much of the world’s population in its grip. Same scene, no doubt, but a different cast of characters. On this occasion, 5,000 UAW people, half of them delegates, have …
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 …
