American conservatism has not been, by and large, intellectually very precise. Lionel Trilling’s judgment in 1950?which every conservative writer or anthologist seems dutybound at some time to mention in rebuttal? remains apt: “with some isolated and ecclesiastical exceptions” conservative impulses …
The great virtue of Harrison Salisbury’s most recent book, his eighth on Russian subjects in a lifetime of thinking and writing about the Soviet Union, is its high literary quality. Black Night, White Snow is a voluminous, compelling narrative that …
In the early 1960s, American political leaders were looking for a panacea, a quick, easy solution for the embarrassing, even dangerous, problems of poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and explosive political alienation. Head Start was the perfect cure. It was relatively noncontroversial, …
When the New School for Social Research presented Ted Katsaros at its labor-management luncheon last December, it was recognizing, somewhat belatedly, the union reformer. Just 20 years ago, the same luncheon series featured A.J. Hayes’s, then president of the Machinists …
One of the more perplexing aspects of neoconservatism is its apparent belief that America is in the grip of implacable egalitarianism. Nathan Glazer gloomily contemplates the “awesome potency” of “the revolution of equality … the most powerful social force in …
On this eve of the 1980s, American capitalism is in the midst of a crisis that bewilders the conventional wisdom of both liberals and conservatives. The nation is, in a sense, in a period resembling the years between 1919 and …
This is Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s account of his brief and stormy period of service as American ambassador at the United Nations in 1975-76. Moynihan had been a very quiet ambassador in Indira Gandhi’s India. Shortly after his return to the …
When a high priest of neoclassical economic theory, Tibor Scitovsky, went off to write a characteristically unneoclassical work entitled The Joyless Economy, he lamented (with a twinkle in his eye) that his colleagues felt he had gone a bit daft. …
A Letter to ACLU Members Dear Friend, I am the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who went into court last year to defend freedom of speech in Skokie, Illinois, for a handful of people calling themselves “nazis.” The case has …
One morning more than a quarter of a century ago, when I made the familiar turn from University Place east onto 12th Street toward “the building, “there were some 20 or 30 men near the entrance shouting, “Where are Feffer …
A not-so-simple Simon says that now is A Time for Truth, the “truth” as a present-day conservative sees it. In this facile, freeswinging book (published by McGraw-Hill in 1978), William Simon, former secretary of the treasury under Nixon and Ford, …
The attitude of the women’s movement toward Freud has changed in recent years. The movement’s beginnings were marked by an attack upon what were seen as the rationalizations of Freudian theory for the subordination of women. Naomi Weisstein’s “Kinder, Kuche, …
Death is not a pleasant subject to talk or write about. For those who are healthy and busy, the mere thought of death is depressing. But all of us must die sometime, and if we wish to die well, we …
Wilson describes his much discussed new book as a speculative essay in defense of scientific materialism or “the new naturalism.” At the core of his view is “the evolutionary epic.” Everything in the universe, the mind included, evolved into its …
For 20 days, until December 8, the Jonestown horror story made first-page news in the New York Times. In the course of five hours, 911 adults and children were killed or killed themselves. There had been no threat on their …
