Fall 2025

A man is dead: you think of his living face, of his gestures, his actions, and of moments you shared, trying to recapture an image that is dissolved forever. A writer is dead: you reflect upon his work, upon each …

We are in for an increasingly hard time of it. Like bad money in circulation, individual terrorism and acts of violence committed in the name of “the revolution” have a way of showing up cyclically. While the California kidnapping of …

The twenty-five thousand Americans who converged upon Montgomery on March 25 surely did not represent the “best” of America in terms of wealth, status or power, but —in the words of Bayard Rustin—”all the best in America” was there. No …

I. Dennis H. Wrong Robert Heilbroner’s essay, “Counterrevolutionary America,” is the most intelligent and forceful statement of a point of view that is widely held by writers on economic development in the Third World.’ Although Heilbroner is an economist, his …

As I write the slum areas of several dozen large American cities have been ravaged by Negro rioters and by the cops and guardsmen who put them down. For urban Negroes, the pull-back of the poverty program may have been …

Hippies seem to fascinate the mass media somewhat less than they did a year or two ago. Butthey have not disappeared. Older Hippies, who refused to convert to straight society, have moved from Haight Ashbury to Big Sur or other …

I n recent years there has arisen a sophistication which understands that the abolition of private property alone will not guarantee the end of exploitation. The problem has been posed as: how does one check bureaucracy? The problem is a …

In an authoritarian age it is almost inevitable that manipulative and bureaucratic modes of thought should stain the writings of those who oppose society as much as they debase the writings of those who support it. Nor do we speak …

Ours is an omnivorous culture. Even the most prickly and apparently indigestible of critics, like Lenny Bruce and Paul Goodman, get cannibalized. Therefore, it ought to surprise no one that a socialist leader in America should be universally honored as …

Who’s at Center? Editor: I started to read the article “Are American Jews Turning to the Right?” [by Bernard Rosenberg and Irving Howe] in your Winter issue with considerable interest. I stopped reading it before the end of the very …

The future of socialism, I am convinced, depends more on its ability to provide a new conception of ownership than on its ability to redistribute property or secure social benefits. Those traditional aims retain importance even in a technologically mature …

Y e have to go back to the witch doctors or the Shakespeare of Hamlet or Macbeth to reach a world in which specters, abstract beings, names come to life, “objective powers” play so large a part as they do …

What can be said at this point about the broad goals and motivations of the present Chinese Communists leadership? The question is, of course, distressingly imprecise and begs further definition. Is the leadership a monolithic group? Have its goals remained …