What makes me identify as a radical is the conviction that something new must be added to the American calculus of goods and bads, rights and wrongs. I have an uneasy sense of a whole nation skating lightly over a …
I view this undertaking with skepticism. Perhaps I am influenced by the grotesque product of the Commentary effort, but I think that my objections to a symposium on Young Radicals go deeper. Such a symposium presupposes that there is in …
When I was asked to summarize in a few pages my general reaction to this symposium I assumed that this would be an easy task. In fact I have been trying for several hours to discern common themes to which …
I am writing this from New Haven. Last night I debated a retired general on the House Un-American Activities Committee before about two hundred students. The meeting was sponsored by “Challenge,” an organization at Yale which brings controversial speakers to …
The victory of the United Federation of Teachers in the collective bargaining election among 33,000 classroom teachers in New York last December, probably the largest white-collar election ever held in this country, has had some important effects. It will certainly …
A little imagination can go a long way. Just when it seemed that the issue of trade union democracy was to be smothered by the fatuity of the CIO-AFL Ethical Practices Committee, and general indifference, Herman Benson came along with …
We met by chance on the subway platform. My friend was on her way to the Cherry Lane “Theatre of the Absurd”: Ionesco’s “The Killer,” if I recall. Would I go along? I declined with thanks; I was on the …
The size of the recent student peace demonstration in Washington only inadequately suggests its importance. Both in organization and ideology the demonstration differed from all that had gone before in the student movement. It is even possible that Turn Toward …
Among all the Communist parties outside the Soviet bloc, the Italian one (PCI) is probably the most skillful and adaptable. Its characteristic flexibility has been brought into full play during the past half year, when it has had to face …
Deliver us from our friends! They claim to know better what is good for the longshoremen than the Union does. Nothing is more infuriating, particularly when the friend is as generally knowledgeable as Harvey Swados. In this instance, however, it …
THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES, by Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the kind of book which suggests a two-column discussion; one labeled right, one wrong. The author attacks city planners, architects, …
It is hard to imagine that anything written these last few months could cast so harsh a light on the future of our society as Cybernation, a pamphlet written by Donald Michael and published by the Center for the Study …
THE CUBAN STORY by Herbert L. Matthews. George Braziller, 1961. Herbert L. Matthews, the New York Times correspondent whose 1957 interview with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra Mountains was a key step in the rise of the Cuban leader, …
Khrushchev always reminds me of Prussia’s Sergeant-King, Frederick William, who used to exclaim “but ye ought to love me” while caning his subjects. No doubt, he would rather be loved than feared and prefers voluntary to forced assent. Unfortunately he …
MARX’S CONCEPT OF MAN, by Erich Fromm (with a translation from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by T. B. Bottomore). Frederick Ungar, New York, 1961. 260 pp. Hearing the old Lutheran chorals in a Bach oratorio, one is astonished to …
