Hopes on the left, that social democracy might become the alternative to collapsing communism and rising market fundamentalism in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989, have proven to be chimerical. Today, except in the Czech Republic, social democracy barely exists …
In 1944, John Maynard Keynes suffered a heart attack as he ran up a flight of stairs on his way to yet another committee meeting in the New Hampshire resort called Bretton Woods. Meetings, especially those deciding the economic fate …
To intervene or not?—this should always be a hard question. Even in the case of a brutal civil war or a politically induced famine or the massacre of a local minority, the use of force in other people’s countries should …
In September 1945 Rose Coser and I were new graduate students in the Department of Sociology at Columbia. She was from the beginning a vivid and forceful presence who used to sit in the front of Robert K. Merton’s classes …
As far back as the “New Economic Policy” initiated by Lenin in the early 1920s to set the war-torn Soviet economy back on its feet, the idea of combining markets with socialist forms of property ownership has had considerable appeal …
A striking fact of twentieth-century history is the tenacity with which ethno-national groups have maintained their distinct identity, institutions, and desire for self-government. There are few examples in this century of national minorities—that is, national groups who share a state …
During the 1950s and early 1960s, nonviolent protesters challenged legalized racial segregation and discrimination in the only two places on earth where such blatant manifestations of white supremacy could be found—the southern United States and the Union of South Africa. …
The abbreviation of the 1994 baseball season depressed millions of Americans, but it was crushing for fans of the New York Yankees. What a team we had: not Murderers’ Row, maybe, but strong up the middle, deep on the bench, …
Hume said that absolute monarchy was “the easiest death, the true Euthanasia, of the British constitution.” I offer some notes and questions about a line of political apologetics that if pursued far would lead to the euthanasia of liberal society. …
The occupation of Haiti, the first progressive American military intervention since World War II, has also been one of the least supported. In the days leading up to the bloodless invasion, it was nearly impossible to find any American backers …
A far-reaching transformation of global politics has made the world a freer but messier place. The cold war was never tidy, yet superpower competition did impose a simplicity—often an unfortunate simplicity—on perceptions of events, if not on the events themselves. …
The debate over surrogate mothering is often seen as a debate over the meaning of motherhood and the status of women in general. Both court decisions and the writings of feminist theorists center on questions about the value of mothering, …
Allard Lowenstein was a liberal insurgent at the heart of the civil rights protests and the antiwar protests of the sixties. His gift was for organizing and speaking, and he had command of the great ability a reformer needs—of turning …
When Ed Sadlowski retired a while back, his friends tried to throw him a surprise party. They failed as far as the honoree was concerned—people on the street in South Chicago just kept telling him they’d see him Saturday night. …
Europe is not lost yet. Daniel Bell’s arguments are good, but not convincing. Bell’s basic error lies in his hidden suspicion of the shape of the European welfare state. Without a doubt, in the next ten years the social welfare …
