In “Literature and Science” (1883), a lecture delivered in America during the high noon of the Victorian culture wars, Matthew Arnold defended the study of Greek against utilitarian educational reformers and a newly assertive commercial class. “Literature may perhaps be …
Must avant-garde art manifest a radical aim? Does it require a collective identity? Is it the product of an “ideological community”? To each of these questions, Harold Rosenberg—coiner of the term “Action Painting” for the abstract art of de Kooning, …
This past summer the bones of Czar Nicholas II and his family, dug out of the basement in Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg in 1918), were solemnly reburied in St. Petersburg according to the rites of the Orthodox Church, with Boris Yeltsin, president …
Although Seyla Benhabib, Michael Rustin, and I seem to occupy contrasting positions on the European question, I am not sure how deep our differences really are. We agree that the EU is an important new departure in transnational cooperation, one …
At least once a day I hear myself saying some version of the following to my two daughters, ages ten and thirteen: “We didn’t have X when I was young.” Depending on the situation, the next sentence will be, “And …
In 1848, acccording to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “a specter [was] haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” In that same year, the upstate New York village of Seneca Falls hosted a gathering of fewer than three hundred people, earnestly debating …
My beach book this past summer was Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld. Near Asbury Park, on a beach that was eroding by the hour, where the emergency jetty was blown away and the surf rushed at us like a gang …
The November 1997 defeat of “fast track” was arguably the AFL-CIO’s greatest public-policy triumph in a generation. The failure of Congress to extend presidential fast track negotiating authority—which would next have been used in an attempt to broaden the North …
Ron Carey’s recent downfall as head of the Teamsters Union carried with it genuine overtones of tragedy. His ascension to the presidency some years ago seemed just reward for his own incorruptible dedication to the rank and file and for …
The name of R.H. Tawney still evokes the heroic phase of socialism. His work is associated with the belief in equality and fellowship, with the commitment to strive for the creation of a just social order to replace capitalism, and …
On August 18, 1994 President Saddam Hussein promulgated Law 109. It read: “According to Section 1, Article 42, of the Iraqi Constitution, the Revolutionary Command Council has decreed that . . . the foreheads of those individuals who repeat the …
A seemingly offhand personal note toward the end of this slim but remarkable volume of political theory conveys the earthy origins of an abstract egalitarian impulse. As the child of a bourgeois Italian family, Norberto Bobbio recalls how he would …
San Jose, Costa Rica : The telephone rang; Danilo said, “Hello.” “This is Bam-Bam. I hear you have lost something.” “Yes, my car was stolen.” “If you authorize me, if you authorize me, I will look for it, providing that …
Since January the American media have been obsessed with sex, scandal, and lurid sensationalism in an unprecedented way. This has baffled and amused outside observers, especially Europeans, who are always ready to sneer at this country’s “puritanical” and hypocritical attitudes …
News from the affirmative action battle front: two members of the top brass have deserted the hard-line opposition. Nathan Glazer, who crusaded against affirmative action for more than two decades, has switched sides. Glenn Loury, who broke with the neoconservatives …
