Spring 2025

When I think of Irving, I think of a Mets game we decided to go to on the spur of the moment one Sunday. It was a hot July day, Doc Gooden was pitching, and fifty thousand other New York …

In May, our friend Irving Howe died, one of the great figures among the so-called “New York Intellectuals.” He belonged to a generation that first made itself known in the pages of the Partisan Review, one of the great magazines …

For Irving, Orwell was the model of a writer. For me, Irving was. They had much in common: passion, commitment, clarity, an eloquent simplicity. Both were plainspoken. Both trusted their instincts and judgments, and did not confuse emotion with prejudice. …

Irving Howe invited me to write for Dissent in 1972, when I was a graduate student. My main qualification was my participation in a socialist youth group. This was one of Dissent’s first moves toward generational reconciliation, but given my …

A meeting was called a couple of months ago at the not-for-profit Jewish agency where I’ve taught English as a second language (ESL) on and off for several years to recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The administrators of …

Recent mass marches on Washington, no matter how noble or well-attended, have generally been dispiriting affairs. On various days in the past six years liberals and leftists have gathered on the Mall by the tens of thousands in support of …

A Democratic member of Congress recently asked me over to his office to discuss the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). I explained why I thought it was a bad idea. The three members of his staff who were there …

The idea of civil society has a long history in Western political thought. Developed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Paine, and taken up in systematic form by Hegel, it refers to those human networks …

The decline of unions in the United States has led scholars and labor activists to ask about past forms of collective action by workers other than contractual worksite representation through governmentally certified bargaining agents. During the last two decades historians …

Socialism presented a serious conceptual challenge to capitalism, but never managed to threaten it in the marketplace. “Late” industrialization in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan has evolved squarely within the capitalist fold. But because it has, in fact, succeeded in …

Since I am going to argue with some parts of this book, let me say at once that it is a significant study and well deserves the praise with which it has been received. Linda Colley writes with clarity and …

A Nation of Fliers examines the rise of aviation in Germany, from its beginnings through the eve of World War II, to illuminate the relationship between technology and culture during the Nazi period. It is not only an interesting book …

This has been a season of demented men. They flicker on the movie screen, igniting our emotions, and then leave us in darkness. Rarely do they touch the better parts of our nature. Mostly they engender fear and teach violence …

Daughter of a prominent Bolshevik intellectual, Anna Larina was twenty years old when she married the forty-five-year-old Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin in 1935. As a little girl delighted by Bukharin’s playfulness and charm, she had looked forward to his visits …

President Clinton holds that pharmaceutical companies are overcharging patients for their medicines and that price controls are needed to stop the abuse. So far, it appears that Clinton may be more successful than Bush in bringing his own brand of …