With the 54-day stand-off that stretched from the kidnapping to the murder of Aldo Moro, the strategists of the terrorist warfare, which for years has been bloodying Italy, set themselves a double objective. First: to put the hostage on trial, both as a person and …
A curious feature of Solzhenitsyn’s Commencement Speech at Harvard (National Review, July 7, 1978) is its attack on freedom of the press. The untoward liberties that American journalists are known to take have been shocking to Solzhenitsyn, and he responds with something between petulance and indignation. …
Despite some signs of middle-age spread, the United Automobile Workers Union, now over 40 years old, sustains a politically sophisticated response to issues while preserving much of the democratic spirit that distinguished its earlier years. The UAW still is known …
Lillan Rubin’s World of Pain is a moving study of working-class families, written from socialist and feminist perspectives. In sympathetic prose, Rubin conveys the frustration and anxiety that pervade the lives of the 100 men and women from Northern California …
Ghosts of the past haunt the political scene. Epithets like “cold war,” “isolationism,” and “appeasement” are heard again. While the Administration is trying to normalize relations with China or to find ways of accommodation with the future rulers of Africa, it hears charges from all sides: …
A mong fellow economists, Veblen’s reputation over the years has ranged from low to ambiguous. A few years before his death in 1929, he rejected nomination for president of the American Economic Association on the ground that the recognition came …
Public-opinion polls indicate that Americans overwhelmingly distrust the Soviet Union—and favor nuclear-arms agreements with the U.S.S.R. This split vision happens to reflect a healthy dose of reality. On the one hand, Soviet leaders have done little to reassure the West in recent years. Soviet adventurism in …
I was reading Antigone when I was told of Harold Rosenberg’s death, and the sadness of the event has merged in my mind with some of the sadness of the play. I keep thinking of a remark made by Antigone that is not only …
The discussion of any important social question must involve an inextricable mixture of fact and value. The fundamental impulse to change and especially to great change is a perception of present wrong and a vision of potential right. The initial …
This past July Douglas Fraser, president of the United Automobile Workers Union, announced that he was pulling out of the high-level Labor- Management Group of union and business leaders presided over by former Secretary of Labor John Dunlop, because in Fraser’s view American capitalism had declared …
The coal strike of 1977-78 resulted in a serious defeat for the United Mine Workers’ Union. After a remarkable display of solidarity, the miners returned to work on March•27 dissatisfied and discouraged. The final contract gave them a 37 percent wage increase spread over three …
On the surface, the big business program for the 1970s is much easier to understand than its acceptance by much of mainstream liberalism and the public at large. From the early ’70s onward, such corporate-connected strategists as John Connolly, William Simon, David Rockefeller, and even Charles …
Everyone believes in rights. Everyone believes that rights should be taken seriously. But what precisely are rights, and what does it mean to take them seriously? Take the simple assertion: I have a right to do (or not to do) …
On the surface, the big business program for the 1970s is much easier to understand than its acceptance by much of mainstream liberalism and the public at large. From the early ’70s onward, such corporate-connected strategists as John Connolly, William …
Taking Rights Seriously, by Ronald Dworkin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 293 pp. The Practice of Rights, by Richard Flathman. Cambridge, London, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 250 pp. Everyone believes in rights. Everyone believes that rights should …
