Literature is an ironic mask. It knows that’s what it is. A nonironic mask is a lie. The mask is a metaphor for the face; it is at once sharp featured and enigmatic. The faces of others are a few simplified lines; when recalling them, …
Energy policy has customarily been regarded as a highly technical subject requiring expertise in nuclear physics and other recondite disciplines. Accordingly, energy policy was largely restricted to the technical aspects of conversion, transmission, and the arcana of pricing, and was …
Christopher I.asch’s two recent books, Haven in a Heartless World (Basic Books, 1977) and The Culture of Narcissism (W. W. Norton, 1979), amount to an extended moral denunciation of contemporary American life, its frantic hedonism, vulgar opportunism, and pervasive hollow anxiety. Such jeremiads are scarcely in short …
On March 28, the water used to cool a “containment vessel” in the atomic plant at Three Mile Island, in Middletown, Pennsylvania, grew dangerously hot and gave every sign of growing hotter. The consequences were as follows. The company that …
Barrington Moore has come a long way since he published his monumental study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, over a decade ago and since he collaborated with Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Wolff in 1965 on an unfortunate book …
The varying reactions to Three Mile Island and to the impending decontrol of the price of domestical- ly produced oil illuminate the shifting fault lines of American politics and provide a glimpse of what the ’80s are likely to offer …
I: Philip Green What is political equality? Any simple definition of such a vague concept is unlikely to be more than a slogan. We must begin somewhere, though, and Robert Dahl’s recent essay “On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in the United States” in the Summer …
Eurocommunism is not a homogeneous movement, but some common elements do exist. One central problem, which arises both on practical and basic theoretical grounds, lies in the relationships between the Communist parties of Western Europe and the Soviet party, and between the vision of “socialism” advanced by …
Conservative trends across the country result not only from a middle-class taxpayers’ revolt but also from forces within the Democratic party that are hostile to any left-leaning tilt. An unexpected mainstay of these forces have been the procedural reformers, men …
Thoughts on Skokie Editors: The gravamen of the ACLU position in the Skokie case is contained in David Goldberger’s assertion that”. . . the nazis are not the real issue. The Skokie laws are the real issue.” As Mr. Goldberger’s letter points out, …
Earlier this year, Simon Leys, the distinguished author of Broken Images and Chinese Shadows, led an informal discussion sponsored by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas. The following passages from a transcript of his remarks have been excerpted and edited …
Every attempt to apply equality in everyday life produces paradoxes. Equality of opportunity assures inequality of result; equality of condition restricts equality of opportunity. Separate facilities make black and white schoolchildren unequal, but only separate facilities provide equality for children …
Beit Jallah is a lovely but restive town outside of Jerusalem, on the Bethlehem road. On March 21, 1978, students in Beit Jallah assembled to protest the Israeli incursion into Lebanon, begun six days earlier to repay in kind the murderous Palestinian assault upon an Israeli …
We print below a section of The Fifth Modernization, a dazibao or wall journal, which appeared in Peking several months ago. The English version is taken from a French translation from the Chinese, printed in Esprit, the independent left magazine that appears …
Four years after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War has become the most important subject in American film. Just why is not clear, but certainly it is a phenomenon that invites suspicion as though, in a period of Jonestown massacres and Gary Gilmore executions, …
