At first one thinks, this is a horrible joke. Could such an article have been written by Hannah Arendt, the author of the book on totalitarianism? So one then looks for the obvious clues one has missed, the clues which …
In the nineteenth century the academic man was shielded, at least in part, from the general transformation of labor into a commodity. In our own time, as professors Caplow and McGee demonstrate in their valuable and informative study, the academician …
Our society prides itself on the fact that the concentration camp remains a thing apart, a distinctive feature of totalitarian society. We have prisons, of course, but the prisoner is usually protected from starvation, unrestrained brutality, and pitiless economic exploitation. …
“A Society that can afford atomic bombs can afford some good psychiatry,” say the authors in their conclusions to this book, after documenting in impressive detail that at present American society provides scandalously poor psychiatric care to the majority of …
THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. 1958. J. K. Galbraith, the well-known Harvard professor, has worked out a plan for a socialist society. I don’t mean to frighten him or some of his faithful readers. (I …
SOVIET MARXISM: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS, by Herbert Marcuse Columbia University Press, New York 1958. History written from the viewpoint of victorious politicians and generals always carries the onus of apology: apology for the present rulers who are the heirs of …
What shall we call the new Pope when he dies? That will be something of a problem, since the recently-deceased Pius XII was so regularly hailed as “the greatest” in the American press. Harry Truman at least tried to qualify …
After a brief period of excitement over fascism and Bonapartism in France, American liberals have returned to their cherished complacency by observing that nothing has really changed in that…
DOWN ON THE FARM, as Stanford University’s campus is sometimes called, an atmosphere of the leisurely past is carefully cultivated. The campus itself, sprawling across acres of precious…
The interesting thing about this recession is that signs of it were visible as far back as two years ago. One indication of economic malaise was an enormous credit expansion accompanied,…
Les Juifs Ne Savent Pas S’Orga’niser En Collectivitd. (The Jews Do Not Know How to Organize Themselves Collectively.) So ran the headline over an interview by Nikita Khrushchev to Le…
The article that appears below is taken from a forthcoming book entitled The Philosophy of Art History, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf in the fall of 1958. It forms part of a chapter…
The eternalization of the present is a recurrent characteristic of conservative thought: the insistence that what is exhausts what can be. It is striking that this notion should…
