Let us say that you are the editor of a journal that has a fairly explicit political viewpoint, and you decide that along with articles on political and social issues you want to run some pieces on cultural subjects as …
The longevity of the East European Communist systems—they have lasted over 35 years—poses a serious question: what are the sources of social stability and legitimacy in these societies? In the late ’40s and early ’50s most specialists assumed that, except …
On numerous occasions I’ve seen police cars come to a screeching halt and policemen scatter in apprehending a suspect. Each time, save one, the apprehended black male was dragged along the pavement, smacked in the face, or otherwise abused. This …
When Voltaire was asked why he kept a Bible on his night table, he replied: “You have to know your enemies.” I subscribe to Commentary on this Voltairean principle. As a result I got onto the mailing list of Midge …
May 15-20. Dallas. No, not Dallas, a soap opera that holds much of the world’s population in its grip. Same scene, no doubt, but a different cast of characters. On this occasion, 5,000 UAW people, half of them delegates, have …
In the Swedish general elections of 1976 the ruling Social Democrats were defeated after 44 years in government. In that election campaign the electorate was concerned with two important new issues that had never before been on the agenda: first, …
No person in any society, male or female, gets through life without working. Some work less, others more; some at dirty or distasteful tasks, others at interesting and pleasant ones; some for money and some for honor, some work at …
The specter of nuclear war has given rise to a small world of its own. It is a subcultural universe of scientists and engineers, bureaucrats, and ideologues concerned with the theory and practice of nuclear destruction. Their creeds and language …
For all its short and in the end unhappy life, the Weimar Republic has commanded, and continues to command, an astonishing amount of public attention. Not a month goes by without a monograph on the Nazi voter in the 1920s, …
A tall, craggy, white-bearded gentleman who looks like and is the small-town publisher of a weekly newspaper has an intriguing comment about his past. Born of an antebellum family in Mississippi, his past includes Phi Beta Kappa at Columbia University; …
At the end of October 1981, I delivered a lecture at one of the higher educational institutions in southeastern Poland. When I finished, a young man rose to ask a question that had no relation to the subject of my …
“The learned and imaginative life is a way of living and is not an article of commerce,” wrote the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in 1929. Fifty years later, in commending an industrial associates program to the Yale faculty, A. Bartlett …
It has been 40 years since Carlo Tresca was gunned down on the streets of New York, at 5th Avenue and 15th Street (January 11, 1943). Who killed him? Mussolini’s Fascists? The Stalinists? Mafioso hirelings working for either (Genovese hit …
Retiring Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm bowed out of central Brooklyn politics this winter for the halls of Mount Holyoke College, leaving behind the constituency of American and West Indian blacks whose “mother of the community” she’d been through 14 years of …
A central problem of the American economy has been its cyclical volatility. Swings of widening magnitude have dogged it since the mid-1960s. Industrial production—to take but one indicator— fell 12 percent in 1981-82, somewhat less than in 1974-75, but it …
