Spring 2025

Trying to understand the world we live in can drive a man out of his mind. The different levels of public life we can more or less make out. It’s the connections among them that are hard to grasp. Here …

One afternoon last summer I happened to be watching a TV discussion among five or six black teenagers. All were speaking out of a deep pride in their blackness, as it is almost mandatory to do today, and also out of …

The debate between Roy Wilkins and Roy Innis over demands by Negro students for separate black studies departments has major implications. The question they are arguing is whether separatism is a condition that black Americans should desire and, in fact, …

This Address was delivered on September 8, 1968, in Basel, Switzerland, and published in Die Zeit, October 4, 1968. Ladies and Gentlemen: This is not a protest meeting. Protest is a reaction to the injustice of the day. The injustice …

In December 1968, shortly after the last strike of New York’s United Federation of Teachers ended, its sister union, the United Federation of College Teachers, entered a collective bargaining election at the City University of New York. The UFCT’s opponent was …

Radical critics of American foreign policy often look to America’s socio-economic structure for the source of recent foreign policy failures, while reformist critics blame the decision-making structure. The critics’ prescriptions range from altering the pattern of ownership of the means of …

One of the most appealing themes of student radicals is that in the modern world the individual finds himself all but helpless against the power of enormous institutions, be they government agencies, private corporations, or multiversities. It now is possible …

It takes very little effort to get an argument going between generations about progress. Has there been any in the last couple of generations? Is this really the worst of all possible worlds at the worst of all possible times? …

Two strategies for radical change compete for the favor of those on the Left who are not willing to abandon electoral activity as the principal focus of their political efforts. Some favor building a new party. Others believe the main attempt …

A few weeks before the Presidential election, the auto and steel plants in the Chicago area were flooded with leaflets soliciting support for George Wallace. Here is a paragraph from one of them: The Negro today is the best-treated human being …

For reasons that should be obvious, a society tends to accept as excuses only those conditions which it is possible for its more advantaged members to satisfy. Any of us, no matter how wellborn, can suffer mental disorder. And so …

Two days before the Soviet army entered Czechoslovakia, I received a letter from a student friend in Prague. The writer is an intelligent young man who received his entire formal education under the Communist regime. He had participated vigorously in …

In a recent Newsweek article the economist Paul Samuelson wrote, “[this nation, economically,] belongs up there with the miracle nations of Japan and Israel … [Its] per capita living standards … have climbed rapidly relative to Western Europe … [and] its …

This book is concerned with explaining America’s sudden turn to overt imperial expansion in 1898-99 through the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. One might immediately ask why this is a historical problem since there can be no doubt …

Reading Robert Kennedy’s posthumous account of the momentous Cuban confrontation, I felt a shudder descending my spine. Realizing that the story hinged on the question whether to drive Khrushchev harder or to give him room for maneuver, I could not help …