Mobutu Redux?  

In October 1996 a rebellion broke out in eastern Zaire and spread with astonishing rapidity from one end of the country to the other, toppling in the course of seven months the thirty-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. For those …



Editor’s Page  

Our interview with the leader of the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, Massimo D’Alema, suggests the difficulties faced by European social democracy as it struggles to adjust to, but also to resist, the material and ideological power of the …



The Price of a Sustainable Environment  

In December 1997, the Edwards Aquifer Authority conducted a series of public hearings in five south Texas communities. It wanted to know what people thought about proposed new rules governing withdrawals from the region’s large aquifer. Years of excessive pumping …





American Television and Consumer Democracy  

Among contemporary students of popular culture, a consensus has begun to emerge about American television quite different from the view dominant only a few decades ago. The theorists of “mass society” criticized commercial television from a standpoint informed both by …



Bukharin’s Fate  

The history of Nikolai Bukharin’s novel is almost certainly unique—even in the dismal twentieth century with its mountain of literature written by people doomed by politics. Normally we would be deeply moved by the tragic fate of the book and …



The President and the Prosecutor  

If Bill Clinton were impeached or forced to resign over the Lewinsky case, the incident might force a national examination of how men in power treat female subordinates. The most important question his alleged behavior raises, after all, is not …



Terror in Algeria  

At the beginning of 1998, accounts of massacres in Algeria horrified world opinion. The start of the holy month of Ramadan brought reports that whole villages had been savagely attacked; men, women, and children were systematically slaughtered. More than seventy …











Growing Up Red  

At the age of six, I already knew that capitalism was in crisis. In the summer of 1930, as my father, Yosef, and I were sitting on a large glacial rock in Bronx Park, our favorite spot for reading and …



Actors on an Empty Stage  

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America by Richard Rorty Harvard University Press, 1998 159 pp $18.95M On behalf of countless readers whose reaction to most left academic writing over the past two decades has increasingly been not so …



Editor’s Page  

Our interview with the leader of the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, Massimo D’Alema, suggests the difficulties faced by European social democracy as it struggles to adjust to, but also to resist, the material and ideological power of the …