The Fall 1993 issue of Partisan Review was entirely filled by a symposium on “The Politics of Political Correctness” to which twenty-seven people, most of them professors, contributed. Unlike several famous earlier PR symposia, this one can hardly be said …
For decades French intellectuals captured the world’s imagination through their writings and debates. But since the seventies, their international stature has sharply waned in the wake of the deaths of those—beginning with Andre Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault—who seemed …
Two powerful centrifugal forces are at work in the United States today. One breaks loose whole groups of people from a presumptively common center; the other sends individuals flying off. Both these decentering, separatist movements have their critics, who argue …
Ellen Willis fits a certain stereotype of the post-1960s radical. Out of feminist principle she has renounced marriage. She opposes the war on drugs and writes unrepentantly about the acid trips of her youth. She’s a New Yorker, she’s Jewish, …
The West German Green party had an ironic relationship to the West German Federal Republic. While the self-styled “anti-party party” found its identity in all-out opposition to the established forces and institutions of the Bonn republic, it was also a …
Feminism, like Broadway, the novel, and God, has been declared dead many times. Indeed, unlike those other items, it has been declared dead almost since its birth—by which I mean its modern rebirth in the 1960s. Feminism has also, as …
I have always believed that the magazine is the crucial artifact of civilized life. Not the book—though good books are lovely things— for it is too solid an object, neither (as we say these days) reflexive nor interactive enough. Magazines …
These are heady times here, in many ways reminiscent of the period following the referendum almost two years ago. Then, as now, the white minority had taken an inexorable step in the direction of turning power over to the majority. …
Jean Elshtain and Margaret Steinfels and I agree at least on one thing: too many children are poor, badly educated, at risk of being un- or underemployed, becoming substance dependent, criminal, or dead. What we disagree on are the solutions …
Pity the fate of the graying Greens. Germany is full of this sad—and perhaps politically endangered—species. The “antiparty” that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a synonym for youthful vigor has become just another political party—nearly as …
In June of last year Rene Bousquet, former general secretary of the interior and chief of the Vichy police, was murdered in the doorway of his Paris apartment. His death was the ultimate postponement of a long-delayed trial for crimes …
The twin crises in Somalia and Bosnia have produced a crisis in UN peace enforcement. The high hopes of a “new era” hailed by Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali have crashed in the streets of southern Mogadishu and the very un-“safe …
The concept of the ‘official secret’ is the specific invention of bureaucracy,” Max Weber wrote, “and nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy.” Democratic politics requires a public informed about government decisions, policies, and actions; yet government officials everywhere …
During the last decade, a grass-roots, minority-led movement against environmental racism (more recently described as the movement for environmental justice) has been spreading across urban America. Led largely by local women of color, the movement for environmental justice has received …
The Clinton administration has served the nation well by insisting upon the need for reform in our health system. But to date the debate reflects the dynamic described by Max Weber, through which a spreading pattern of technical rationality and …
