Working-Class Authoritarianism Editor: I must confess that I become annoyed at the not infrequent efforts to refute my writings on “working-class authoritarianism” which attempt to do so by setting up a straw-man target in the form of propositions which either …
My principle concern is the unacknowledged, barely conscious premises of my own or anyone else’s thinking. Besides faith in universal evolution, this includes an unfavorable appraisal of the direction a country, a society, a civilization is taking. It is somewhat …
At a time when the American theater has been suffering from aesthetic sclerosis, the new black theater has shown considerable signs of vitality—so far, it is probably the most promising segment of the much-advertised black cultural renaissance. New playwrights, new …
The Voice of Malcolm When the time came, Malcolm X was going to “unveil” his program—that specific cause-and-effect linking of actions to goals which would bring about equality for black people in the United States. Since his was the most …
We hear a reader praising this or that writer with the puzzled affection to which American literature frequently drives its admirers, we think of the famous phrase about the “complex fate” of being an American, we say to ourselves, yes, …
Winning a war can prove as taxing as losing one. The swift 1967 Israeli conquest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—all that had remained of Palestinian non-Israeli territory after the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948—placed Israel into the …
Union Democracy Review, No. 1, Fall 1972. Unfortunately, few people except unionists know or care much about the internal life of the American labor movement. For those who are interested, Herman Benson’s new Union Democracy Review is a must. A …
Anybody who has been going to American movies for the past five years must know that things have been turned inside out since 1948, when Robert Warshow complained that “America as a social and political institution is committed to a …
The Illusion of Equality, by Murray Milner, Jr. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 172 pp. Sociologists frequently challenge the conventional wisdom not because they are perverse but because they must pay heed whenever their data do not square with prevailing ideas. So …
Chile is now the owner of its mines, and the workers must know that copper is the wage of Chile, its principal wealth. Copper earns 83 percent of Chile’s foreign exchange income. Of Chile’s total exports of $1.15 billion, copper …
It is not surprising that the woman question has come to seem urgent during the last few years. A period so given to activity in behalf of every liberation could be counted upon to leave no convention undisturbed. Although such …
In a country that builds obsolescence into its automobiles, movie stars, and protest movements, the same calculated mortality appears in its literary fiction and in the boldly plausible generalizations of its critics. A mere seven years ago Leslie Fiedler, with …
Many years ago Paul Goodman called me on the phone. “How are you?” I asked. “Right this minute,” he replied, “I feel lousy. Underneath, though, I’m all right. Below that there is, of course, the usual nagging. At bottom, however, …
A new intellectual type has risen on the American scene, the celebrity intellectual. He addresses a semieducated mass public that makes little claim to expert knowledge or refined taste, and that adheres to no commonly shared cultural standards. The celebrity …
The Sorrow and the Pity is a four-hour-long documentary film on life in France during the Nazi occupation. Its success seems to derive from two main sources: first, that it deals with such eternal themes as humiliation, powerlessness, and conflicting …
