Eugene D. Genovese writes powerfully against bad faith, against prevarication championed and recognized but not admitted. He is relentless: how can one confront impostors of liberation with timidity? Least of all when mendacity concerns mass murder and you admit your …
In Brussels, in August 1830, the revolution began at the opera. It was William I’s birthday and the fifteenth anniversary of this Dutch king’s rule over Belgium, a spoil of the Congress of Vienna. The evening was to crown three …
Earth Day 1970 marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Twenty million Americans gathered to demonstrate their distress over the state of the environment. Their message was historically distinct. In the past, environmental concern revolved mainly around establishing and …
In my spare time, I collect significant encounters that never took place. Karl Marx and Charles Darwin were intended by a mutual friend to meet but the rendezvous did not occur. George Orwell waited for Albert Camus to keep an …
I very much appreciate the manifest content of Eugene Genovese’s piece, although I’m impatient with its deeper import. As for the first, I agree entirely that it remains difficult, often impossible, to discuss publicly within the sociable circles and academic …
For Eugene Genovese the time has come to confess, to acknowledge the silences of the 1950s, and, perhaps, to free ourselves to move forward. In a belated recognition of the evils of Stalinism, he condemns those on the left who …
Neither H. Brand nor Joanne Barkan finds much to dispute in my analysis of the forces that drive immigration, the impossibility of fully consistent positions in response to calls for its restriction, or the desirability of progressive social policies to …
Confessions? Apologies? Nothing could be further from my mind. It has never occurred to me to apologize to anyone for the content of my life, which I would have judged on its balance of good and evil. I share Christine …
There is good reason to fear that “postmodern” and “postindustrial” currents of thought will sweep away the foundations of existing radical critiques without offering anything very substantial in their place. It is all very well to criticize social democracy, the …
From the mid-1960s to 1980, the piazzas belonged to the left in Italy. So did the bookstores, since dominant culture—criticism, political science, philosophy, the arts—leaned heavily to the left. Conservatives despaired: Oh, when would Italy become a normal West European …
A little over a year ago, at a briefing at NATO headquarters in Brussels, I heard an American colonel, in quick succession, acclaim the organization’s new dialogue with ex-Warsaw Pact generals, argue for the continuation of NATO funding despite the …
When people say “welfare” today, they mostly refer to AFDC, the program for single parents and their children. These single parents are mostly mothers, of course, and the current vilification of welfare recipients and their “dependency” is directed primarily at …
In the national elections held in Italy in late March that ushered in a “Second Republic,” the enfant terrible of Italian politics over the last several years, the Northern League, won only 8.4 percent of the national vote. Yet as …
I agree with Eugene D. Genovese that the left needs to rethink some of its premises. His polemic is not, however, a useful contribution to this reappraisal. The first article by Genovese I can recall reading was “Dr. Herbert Aptheker’s …
The politics of race and poverty in the United States presents something of a paradox. Throughout the past decade and a half, the nation has been obsessed with the urban minority poor. Fears about the growth of a separate, violent, …
