WRITE a long, flowing political novel about a small group of Old Left, Anti-Stalinist socialists, tracing their paths from a youthful idealism in the late thirties to a weariness in the early sixties. Weave together their tangled personal lives and …
FEW SCHOLARS HAVE INFLUENCED our thinking about “extremism” as much as Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of social relations at Harvard. The first writer to apply the concept of a “radical Right” to American social movements (in 1951), he later proposed …
AFTER THE 1956 UPHEAVALS in the Communist world, and with the open outbreak of conflict between the Soviet and Chinese regimes, it became difficult to maintain the old belief that Communism was unvaried and unchanging. Yet, no matter how much …
ALL LITERATURE IS UTOPIAN in that fictive worlds are literally ou topos, i.e., no place. Implicitly or explicitly, literature is almost always a criticism of life because imagined reality is inevitably comparable to sensibly perceived reality. Actions can scarcely be …
“LOSS OF IDENTITY” and “quest for community”—these phrases, nearly worn out from overuse by pop-intellectuals, are rescued and restored to life by Richard Sennett in this thoughtful, seminal little book about the urban condition in America. “Condition” rather than “crisis,” …
ONE CAN APPROACH the phenomenon of fascism from various angles. The first analyses, mostly by Communist writers, explained it simply as the dictatorship of monopoly capital (a thesis that still lingers in Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, 1941, and Ignazio Silone’s School for Dictators, …
The Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu boasts a long, international-award-winning bibliography of poetry and prose. Yet in his fiction, he often speaks through narrators hostile to publication and recognition.
No play as important, as interesting as Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy has been shown for a very long time—and no play as interesting in an important way. I would insist, too, that the importance of the work is due not …
In the last few months, especially since the war in Vietnam and protests against it have both escalated, a number of commentators from many wings of opinion—right, center, and socialist—have expressed a great deal of doubt about and disapproval of …
I never met a colleague in the teaching of a college history course who expected to learn very much from grading a batch of blue books. Yet an untidy pile of essays on my desk—essays designed to persuade me that …
Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor by Thomas R. Brooks, foreword by A.H. Raskin Delacorte, 300 pp., $6.00 There are Civil War buffs who read and reread the chronicles of that immensely important time. There are labor buffs …
The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience by Harold Rosenberg Horizon Press, 270 pp., $7.50 I praised Harold Rosenberg’s first volume of criticism (The Tradition of the New) for its variety: this new volume must be praised for its …
