The turn of the century brought with it a special kind of regimentation for the American worker. As labor historian David Brody has noted, after 1900 the wage earner stood “wholly within the modern industrial order.” There was less of …
In the early 1970s, I taught a course at Harvard on the moral arguments for capitalism and socialism. It was easy to find readings in defense of capitalism. The rights of entrepreneurs, contractual freedom, contribution and “desert” as the basis …
I do not recall a time when the prospects for the left in America have looked quite so dim. By “the left,” I mean both the relatively small group of intellectuals and perpetual activists who have been responsive to Marxian …
An interesting poll done for the New York Stock Exchange by Garth, Friedman, and Morris last December (after the election) reveals that 61 percent of the American people believe the U.S. economy is in a crisis. They are right. Evidence …
The following text was delivered as a talk at the convention of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in the spring of 1981.— Eds. In a luminous sketch the Italian writer Ignazio Silone recalls an incident from his childhood. He once …
Hard-headed realists tell us, much as we may wish otherwise, standardized tests prove that millions of America’s schoolchildren (approximately half) are failing to learn even the basic educational skills. Despite all the efforts of the Great Society (Head Start, Titles …
The Jean Harris trial has mesmerized Americans. It has received an unprecedented amount of publicity. Diana Trilling, Shana Alexander, and Lally Weymouth, daughter of Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, have been commissioned to write books on the subject; …
It’s “snake oil,” says the Economist, in writing about President Reagan’s proposed “investment incentives.” Coming from anyone else, that sort of snotty talk could just be brushed off. But the Economist is not just another publication: it is the highly …
There is something shameless about Ford Motor Company executives abandoning the Company’s 75-year-old free-trade policy to seek government protection from Japanese imports. No doubt, Ford is having its trouble selling cars. Ford reported a 1980 loss of $1.54 billion. Detroit’s …
As the Reagan administration busies itself with supplying military hardware to assorted repressive right-wing regimes in Latin America (Guatemala, Argentina, the lot of them), the publication of Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, by Jacobo Timerman (Knopf) could …
Originally published by one university press in 1973, Paul Hollander’s work is now reissued in paperback by another. The publishing business being what it is a revised text is impossible, but this new edition does carry a new Introduction in …
The other day I was asked to speak at a gathering on “the moral basis of socialism.” I was somewhat taken aback since it was not clear to me whether socialism can claim a moral basis apart from that of …
Despite opinion polls that consistently show the majority of Americans supporting abortion, the status of legal abortion seems more precarious than ever. Anti-abortionists in Congress are proceeding on two fronts to outlaw abortion altogether: with a constitutional amendment banning abortion …
Three assumptions of popular political wisdom often heard since the November 1980 debacle do rob one of patience: (1) the Democratic party must learn to forgo the temptations of “ideological politics”; (2) the Democratic party and liberalism in general have …
This book, the most comprehensive look so far at dissidence in the Soviet Union, is a well-written summary account of the Moscow human rights movement, from the era of the post-Stalinist reforms through Andrei Sakharov’s internal exile in 1980 to …
