In The Political Economy of Slavery, Eugene Genovese has made an original contribution to our understanding of ante-bellum Southern history. His contribution lies not so much in the discovery of new facts as in placing familiar materials in a fresh theoretical context. Genovese is the first to systematically …
One always preserves the fears of his youth. Those who grew up in the fifties will never forget McCarthy: when they see a Communist being attacked, they are sure it’s a witch hunt. Some liberals are so obsessed by the …
By now, there is a fair-sized library devoted to the definition and description of poverty in the United States. The Government itself has financed some excellent studies (Mollie Orshansky’s analysis for the Social Security Administration is an outstanding example). And …
Indonesia is passing through a period which could lead to its disintegration as a nation. The standing of its new military government and its leader Bung Karno has dropped to zero. The admitted slaughter of 87,000 Communists (according to Sukarno) …
Conor Cruise O’Brien, at least on the international scene the radical-liberal intellectual par excellence, has recently published a new collection of articles and speeches, Writers and Politics. As a United Nations official effectively in charge of the UN’s Congo operation, …
“A change is gonna come” is the battle hymn of the New Left. But after a year of marching around the “Establishment” walls, which not only didn’t fall down but hardly shook at all, Students for a Democratic Society is …
Never, to my knowledge, in the history of intellectual controversy has any book met such devastating refutation as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem in Jacob Robinson’s critique, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight.* After Robinson’s argument not a single …
The first year of the effort to reinvigorate the League for Industrial Democracy has been completed. It is time to take stock. When Michael Harrington was named LID Chairman in September, 1964, and a young staff took over the office, …
The culmination of intensive efforts to codify the life of the hapless is a document published by the Department of Labor entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and commonly referred to as “The Moynihan Report,” after the …
American liberals have traditionally believed that many of the country’s problems were susceptible to gradual and comparatively painless solution by combining education and technological innovation. In part, this assumption is correct. But most of America’s problems are rooted not in …
The Moynihan Report employs supposed inadequacies of the Negro family as an explanatory tool for understanding why the Negro has not taken his place fully in the economic structure of our society. Presumed family pathology particularly illegitimacy, is said to …
Paul Jacobs has written an intensely personal autobiography. Throughout the book he is trying to tell the reader how he felt about whatever he was doing during his youth as an American radical—or at least what he now thinks were …
There are two sorts of polemics. The first aims at refuting an opponent’s argument; the second aims to discredit it. The first requires a more or less careful presentation and critique of a moral or political position; the second depends …
Andrei Sinyaysky and Yuli Daniel, who published fiction and essays in Western periodicals under the pennames of Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak, have been sentenced to seven and five years in forced labor camps by the Russian Supreme Court. They …
The situation in Watts erupted in volcanic form because the people there knew or felt that their deep troubles were interlaced with manifest injustice. And this eruptive potential is seething just under the surface in portions of every large city …
