The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, by Walter Sheridan. New York: Saturday Review Press. 554 pp. As head of the Kennedy “get Hoffa” squad, Walter Sheridan was instrumental in putting Hoffa into prison. His book is a warning about …
The worst intoxication is ideology. We must approach reality humbly. —Octavio Paz The brutal destruction of the Allende government by the military junta is a heavy blow to democrats and socialists everywhere who hope for peaceful change in their societies. …
In a Paris street brakes screech, and a man is running: headlights skid across the dank walls of buildings. Staggering, the man escapes whatever was after him, and then finds a companion walking at his side. A friend? Just another …
The idea of revolution was the great invention of the West in its second phase. Societies of the past did not have real revolutions; they had changes of mandate and dynasty. Apart from these changes, they experienced profound transformations: births, …
For America the war in Vietnam has ended, but exile continues for those who refused to participate in the war. The fate of the 75,000 to 125,000 men in exile will be determined, in part, by the outcome of the …
Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.-J. Proudhon, by Robert L. Hoffman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 429 pp. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s intellectual bones have been claimed by such varied inheritors—anarchists and fascists, syndicalists and individualists, progressives and reactionaries—that …
Equality, wrote Alexandre Dumas the younger, brought kings to the guillotine and the people to the throne. Like most felicitous phrases, this is no more than a partial truth. New tyrants rather than “the people” often ascended to the momentarily …
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Forecasting, by Daniel Bell. New York: Basic Books. 507 pp. It is the thesis of this book that the R&D revolution brings forth a new type of society, which can no longer …
And the town stands locked in ice: a paperweight of trees, walls, snow. Gingerly I tread on glass; the painted sleighs skid in their tracks.
“Notes for Next Time: A Memoir of the 1960s,” by Elinor Langer. Working Papers for a New Society, Fall 1973. Working Papers for a New Society now has published three issues—not enough to have assumed a definite character. The magazine …
A t first it appeared that we in the West were once again fated to watch helplessly as the media relayed reports of another East European tragedy. Amalrik’s sentence was doubled, Medvedev’s passport revoked while he was in England, Solzhenitsyn …
Democratic societies with universal suffrage and competing political parties experience a cyclical alternation of periods dominated by protest from the Left and retrenchment by the Right. The notion that politics conform to such cyclical periodicity is scarcely a new one: …
On January 5, 1973, President Nixon, with but little advance warning, suspended all federal housing subsidy programs. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Farmers Home Administration of the Department of Agriculture were ordered not to process any …
When Hamlet says, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” he means that the king is corrupt. He is not making any comment on the political life of ordinary Danish citizens, for there were no citizens and no political …
Economics and the Public Purpose, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Boston: Houghton Miflin. 334 pp. I hope I will be forgiven if I begin a discussion of John Kenneth Galbraith’s latest and most important book with a small lecture. The subject …
