Winter 2024

I r was said that 10 days shook the world in 1917 and two days shook the world in 1968. In these two days, the people of Czechoslovakia have shown that, given the unity, they are able to assert their …

Our readers will have noticed that my comment in the last issue concerning Czechoslovakia was already dated by the time the issue came out. My apprehensions about Russian intervention were, alas, not dated. To a limited extent, the Russians have …

Czeslaw Milosz belongs to the small group of contemporary writers who have “looked into the abyss” and survived the experience, scarred but without having lost their integrity as writers and human beings. His book The Captive Mind established him some …

In last year’s U.S. pavillion at the Montreal World’s Fair I noticed a sign reading: Hall of the Great Society —Emergency Exit. Let’s take that exit right now! After the obscene happening at Chicago that went by the name of Democratic …

Pierre Mendes-France was beaten at Grenoble by the former Gaullist minister Jean-Marcel Jeanneney. Out of an electorate of about 40,000, Jeanneney’s plurality was 130. In beginning with such an example, I do not wish to pretend that all the Gaullist …

The question, Who speaks for the Negro? invites no satisfactory answer in these rhetoric-drenched times. Or, rather, it invites so many answers that none of them can be satisfactory. No large city is without its complement of lusty-lunged fellows who …

Politics in France has always been conducted as a branch of the drama: that was one reason Marx found it so rich a subject for historical narrative. Writing about the French Revolution, he remarked upon the regularity with which the …

The State University Of New York at Stony Brook lies on a lightly wooded rise some five miles south of Smithtown Bay on Long Island and roughly 60 miles east of New York City. Stony Brook has been described as the showplace of the …

A federal district court in Boston has found Dr. Benjamin Spock and three of his codefendants guilty of conspiring to “hinder and interfere … with the administration” of the Selective Service Act, and to “counsel, aid and abet … the registrants …

As a film-maker, Jean-Luc Godard has been uniquely associated with the sensibility of the young; he has given it models to live by and images of at least partial self-approval. From his first and perhaps still his best picture, Breathless, …

This Book deals with the general problem of African development. It contends that “there is no curse on Black Africa,” and it goes on to elucidate the special aspects of African development. The author rightly places blame on the Western …

There are two ways to read this book: as an extensive compendium of speculations on alternative futures, and as evidence of the conceptual quicksand upon which such speculations are built. Since, as the authors persuasively argue, futurist speculations will increasingly become …

Bolivia’s recent guerilla episodes, whose protagonists and victims were Che Guevara and Regis Debray, are notable less for their cruelty—to which we have become only too accustomed—than for their chaos and confusion. A gratuitious incoherence permeates all the upheavals in …

The title of these notes conveys their tentative nature. To “understand” is not to explain, for explanation presupposes that we can assign casual weights to factors. But understanding—placing an event in the context of other events, past and present, and …

It will be many weeks before details are leaked to the world press about the agreement between the Czechs and Russians in early August. No sensible person, remembering Hungary, will feel anything but relief at the thought that the threat of …