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 …
Classical Greek democracy was the social organization of the free “men” (not women) of a city-state (polls), who had either enough leisure to occupy themselves with matters of common interest or—in the late Athenian democracy— were compensated for their loss …
What has been called Eastern Europe since the end of World War II is a political, not a geographical, phenomenon. Geographically it comprises countries that have always been considered part of Central Europe (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland), as well as countries …
In 1957 Norman Podhoretz participated in a symposium on “The Young Generation of U.S. Intellectuals.” He was 27 years old, already an editor of Commentary. He observed that his generation, which came of age in the Cold War, “never had …
Imaginings of a utopian, or utopian socialist, future can be traced from chapters in Scripture to present-day works. The 19th century was particularly fruitful in this respect; it not only produced works of literary imagination but abounded in significant, organized …
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; …
An intriguing question remains among those raised by the last election, namely, how much did the Catholic bishops’ support for a nuclear freeze, released in draft form just a few days before the voting, influence the outcome in those eight …
Almost exactly a century ago, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor presented what is probably the most trenchant argument ever made against democratic socialism. By democratic socialism I mean the demand that men should come together to create a new kind of community, …
When President Reagan dedicated the flight of the space shuttle to the Afghan resistance, he was displaying once again his intuitive talent for political cabaret. The Reagan administration’s choice to support a “liberation movement” already provides a clue that something …
We asked our respondents the following questions: Suppose—what is unlikely—that you were in a position crucially to influence domestic social-economic policies during the next immediate period. Suppose you could propose, say, three legislative items for coping, not with the basic …
We are now in the middle of the battle over the 1984 budget. The president is browbeating us to “stay the course”; we have to derail him. Our job is not only to restore the services he would cut but …
0n December 22, 1972, Arnold Miller and other members of the Miners For Democracy (MFD) reform slate were sworn in as new officers of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW). Exactly ten years later, on December 22, 1982, Richard …
Suppose the Golem had been made, not of the clay that legend has it, but of plastic: what would have been his fate? Well, he might have been elected president and as he acquiesced in the engineering of a depression …
In order to help move the United States “toward a sane defense policy,” Bogdan Denitch [in Dissent, Summer 1982] calls for “a fundamental examination” by the democratic left of “the assumption behind U.S. defense policy.” Denitch characterizes U.S. society as …
