Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright Verso, 2010, 394 pp. A BOOK on utopias by a Marxist sociologist seems promising, perhaps even courageous. In Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright seeks to counter widespread cynicism about radical social transformation. …
C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writings ed. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, introduction by Dan Wakefield University of California Press, 2000, 378 pp., $34.95 In the nineteen fifties and early sixties, C. Wright Mills cut a wide swath …
Who wants to criticize a commentator as well-meaning and warm-hearted as Marshall Berman? He is a bard of urban life with an infectious enthusiasm for New York. For many years he has been singing of the joys of city streets …
The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History by Lawrence W. Levine. Beacon Press, 1996. 212 pp. $20.00. Almost ten years ago the collected complaints of a conservative University of Chicago professor became an unexpected bestseller. Allan Bloom, …
Remember when the university was called an “ivory tower”? Bookish college presidents? Absentminded professors? Befuddled students? These types belong to a distant, perhaps mythic, past. Today no one charges that college presidents are too scholarly, that professors wander about in …
The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism by Cornel West University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, 279 pp., Cornel West is a smart fellow who has written a difficult but challenging book. It is impossible to read The American …
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 …
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