I begin with two quotations from members of the Supreme Court itself. The first was written by Felix Frankfurter some seventy years ago: “[M]embers of the court are frequently admonished by their associates not to read their economic and social …
The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 by Kevin Mattson
Do Americans “by nature” know how one becomes a “naturalized” American? To become a citizen is far from ordinary in today’s Western countries. Democratic founding is a privilege of the first generation, which binds the next and establishes the political …
“Children and economists,” Robert Lekachman once said, “may think that the men at the head of our great corporations spend their time thinking about new ways to please the customers or improve the efficiency of their factories and offices.” After …
The Politics of Freeing Markets in Latin America: Chile, Argentina,and Mexico by Judith A. Teichman and Managing Mexico by Sarah Babb
Last January, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent, pleaded “not guilty” in Virginia federal court to six counts of conspiring to commit acts of international terrorism in connection with the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the …
Something’s busy dyin’, but is anything being born? The age of market extremism, as Kevin Phillips has termed it, is shuddering to a halt, undone, as in all its previous incarnations, by its own excesses. The shift in public opinion …
Since Hippocrates, providers and seekers of medical care have sought to protect the confidentiality of their communications. Medicine has probably done better than most professions in realizing such aspirations—at least until the last few decades. But by the end of …
Th Changing Grassroots Left in Latin America
Casino Capitalism and Lemon Socialism
Look left today and you will see intellectual crisis. Look first at the mainstream. Social democrats led governments across Europe in recent years. Their talk of a “third way” often displaced social imagination. They rushed to be the “center” instead …
Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters is a widely discussed retrospective on post—Second World War liberalism that raises important questions about the relationships between intellectuals and political power. Obsessed with …
Much post-9/11 advertising confuses patriotism with consumerism. But using the flag to sell things is an American tradition. While researching the life of my great-grandfather Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward, I came across a noteworthy conflation of patriotic …
The Prose of Adam Zagajewski
In her review of my State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (“A Dearth of Inspiration,” Spring 2002), Daphne Eviatar offers a tough-minded critique of a book she labels “utopian” and out of touch with “political reality.” She …
