It is a banal historical truth that the working class played a crucial role in the bourgeois revolutions of continental Europe. Oskar Lange’s comments on the subject are especially perceptive: After the war, when the remnants of the ancien regime …
Despite last year’s run-up in gasoline prices, the energy outlook for the United States appears positive. Adjusted for inflation, gas prices remain near their historic lows, supplies seem adequate, and while some commentators point to growing demand in India and …
In his 1997 inauguration speech President Bill Clinton said: “Our hopes, our hearts, our hands are with those on every continent who are build- ing democracy and freedom. Their cause is America’s cause.” That, unfortunately, is not true. The despots …
The Dayton accords are in trouble. Their only virtue—it is not a small one—is that they stopped the organized fighting in the former Yugoslavia. But they also partitioned Bosnia and left the consequences of “ethnic cleansing” intact. The major war …
People from Central Europe like to tell jokes. For years, jokes offered them asylum. In the world of jokes, they not only felt free and sovereign, despite captivity and Soviet domination, they also laughed. So: two men, with the experience …
Adam Michnik’s introspective and witty “Gray is Beautiful” characteristically possesses broader significance than its putative subject, the shift from “tests of captivity” to “tests of freedom” in postcommunist Europe. He scrutinizes the limits of the civil-society-oriented dreams of his fellow …
Just under ten years ago, a group of socialist and liberal intellectuals in London, fed up with the left-wing splits that had given Margaret Thatcher a hammerlock on power with barely 40 percent of the vote, got together to produce …
In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president with 43 percent of the vote. In 1994, the Democratic congressional coalition collapsed and the Democrats were swept out of power in the House and the Senate. At that point, many said that …
Last October I climbed to the roof of a decrepit apartment building in Managua’s eastern quarter. Originally a roost of the wealthy during the Somoza regime, it was mangled by the 1972 earthquake that leveled much of Nicaragua’s capital. Today, …
The first two Partisan Review anthologies, published in 1946 and 1953 and now out of print, were of an almost unbelievable richness. The contributors whose names began with “A” were Lionel Abel, James Agee, Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, Hannah Arendt, …
Glen Jeansonne’s investigation of the “America First” mothers’ movement, a massive network of ultraright isolationist women’s organizations that flourished in the Midwest and on both coasts from 1939 until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is an informative and often shocking …
Iris Young (“The Complexities of Coalition,” Winter 1997) admits that the left is electorally feeble, but within her framework, it seems to me, she cannot explain the feebleness. Her enthusiasm for the remarkable Jesse Jackson efforts of the eighties may …
Editors: I very much appreciated the symposium on Jeffrey C. Isaac’s critique of a revived progressivism and his hymn to localist democracy (“The Poverty of Progressivism,” Fall 1996). Still, I am concerned that the discussion surrounding the piece so quickly …
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, two Marxist economists, began writing Monopoly Capital in the mid-1950s. After Baran died in 1964, Sweezy put the already revised manuscript into final form, and Monthly Review Press published the work in 1966. …
A stranger smiled at me on Broadway the other day and I smiled back at him. This shouldn’t be unusual, but in New York City it is. What made me reflect on this brief encounter was the ease I now …
