Recreating Liberty?  

The New Liberty: Survival and Justice in a Changing World by Ralf Dahrendorf, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 99 pp. Ralf Dahrendorf, the author of Class Consciousness in Industrial Society and Society and Democracy in Germany, is an American-style academic liberal who …



Fact and Gossip  

The Rise and Fall of American Communism, by Philip Jaffe. Introduction by Bertram D. Wolfe. New York: Horizon Press. By a quirk of history Stalin chose the American Communist party, surely one of the least significant parties in the scheme …



A True Record  

The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921, by Oskar Anweiler. Translated from the German by Ruth Hein. New York: Pantheon Books. 324 pp. Whatever happened to the soviets under which, as Lenin described them, “the masses themselves …



Buckley’s Comrades  

I When the National Review celebrates its 20th anniversary this November, conservatives may salute its editor with the toast: “You’ve come a long way, Buckley.” Among the associate editors, consultants, and contributors another toast might be made, this time raised, …



The Housing Stalemate  

As this article is being written (early July), the House and Senate each have passed housing bills and a conference committee is about to try to resolve two very different approaches. Crudely stated, the House bill, passed on June 20 …



Documentary in Search of a War  

Images of war carry a force the facts alone hardly ever sponsor. When American soldiers went to Vietnam, they also stayed at home, on television, in battle reports that droned for a precise interval and then ceased for 24 hours, …



Three Poems  

The thing An immaterial thing should be treated with great care. Protect it from the damp and cold. Also from the heat. Room-temperature is ideal. Polish daily. Use a peacock plume or toothbrush. On holy days do not display conspicuously …



On Revolutionary Freedom  

The case of Republica [the Portuguese socialist paper taken over by the Communists and MFA] is not simply a revelation of the internal conflicts affecting the destiny of the Portuguese revolution. It is also a revelation of our own capacity …



Who are the Palestinians?  

Who are they, and who has the right to speak for them? Oppressed nationalities find it difficult to get a hearing because those who pretend to represent them often are political adventurers who merely exploit them—be it for imperialistic purposes …



Dilemmas of Social Democracy  

What used to be sorrowfully regarded as the “English disease” can now be diagnosed more precisely as the ailing of social democracy. Some of the symptoms may appear peculiarly British but what I will call “the Social Democratic Dilemma,” and …



On Human Nature  

If man is a rational animal, it is surely odd that he so often debates questions whose answers must be presupposed before the debate can take place. (I use the term “man” here in its primary dictionary meaning, to denote …





George Wallace—Persistent Presence  

Southern state governments in the late 1950s and early 1960s underwent a breakdown of democracy as serious and dangerous as Watergate. The same terrible principle that motivated Watergate controlled most of the region’s state houses. In reaction to the 1954 …





CIA, DIA, FBI—and 50 More!  

After reading the Rockefeller Commission report, Senator Frank Church declared, “This is just the tip of an iceberg.” A little later it looked like the tip of a glacier. From December 22, 1974, when Seymour Hersh’s first dispatch on “Massive …