Massimo D’Alema became the secretary of Italy’s Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) in 1994, when he replaced Achille Occhetto, the party leader who, five years earlier, began the transformation that led to the dissolution of the Italian Communist Party …
In 1935 it was discovered that roughly seven hundred workers had died after drilling tunnels for the Union Carbide corporation at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Congressional investigations revealed that hundreds of these workers had been buried outside the tunnels, in …
During the 1997 campaign Alexa McDonough, leader of Canada’s federal social democrats, announced her ambitions for the election. She did not expect to form the government nor even to become the official opposition. Her first goal was simply to make …
At the age of six, I already knew that capitalism was in crisis. In the summer of 1930, as my father, Yosef, and I were sitting on a large glacial rock in Bronx Park, our favorite spot for reading and …
No longer is the ability to produce goods and services in large volume confined to a handful of countries. We live in an era in which economic development has spread globally. With this heightened productive capacity, many poor countries have …
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America by Richard Rorty Harvard University Press, 1998 159 pp $18.95M On behalf of countless readers whose reaction to most left academic writing over the past two decades has increasingly been not so …
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus Henry Holt and Company, 1997 286 pp $22.50 Time out of Mind by Bob Dylan Columbia Records, 1997 Anthology of American Folk Music Harry Smith, ed. Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings, 1997, re-issue 6 …
Our interview with the leader of the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, Massimo D’Alema, suggests the difficulties faced by European social democracy as it struggles to adjust to, but also to resist, the material and ideological power of the …
October 16, 1995, the largest public gathering of African Americans in history took place in Washington, D.C. The participants had come together under the slogan the Million Man March, with an agenda emphasizing racial pride, personal responsibility, and patriarchal family …
Shortly before writing this essay I received a questionnaire from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. It asked that I choose between the Democratic and Republican positions on nine “critical” issues: crime, the balanced budget, environmental protection, campaign-finance reform, education, religious …
“Communitarianism” entered the language only within the last twenty years. You will not find it in the 1975 edition of Webster’s dictionary, though you will find a “communitarian” there defined as “a member of a society that practices communism.” What …
Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets by Robert Kuttner Knopf, 1997 410 pp $27.50M This is an immensely valuable book that has not gotten the attention it deserves. The reasons for its (relative) neglect have to do …
The real scandal in Washington is not Clinton’s sex life, but the government’s ability to pry into it. The real threat to the republic is not the lack of “character” in the Oval Office, but the erosion of privacy rights …
Not long ago I attended a conference on the theme, “Are serious books in serious trouble?” The question was rhetorical. One by one the suspects were arraigned on charges: publishing conglomerates, superstores, television, public education. By the end American culture …
Economic Justice by Stephen Nathanson Prentice Hall, 1998 144 pp $19.95 Everyone loves a good argument; and as we know from the dialogues of Plato, few questions are more likely to get an argument going than “What is justice?” In …
