Yugoslavia is now irreversibly on the road to a multiparty system as the framework in which both the fate of democracy and the future of the Yugoslav federation will be determined. That at least is quite certain, although the fate …
The backbone of the nation’s long-standing commitment to home ownership was the savings and loan industry, the principal mortgage lender for many years. The government protected it against its larger competitors and provided a modest rate advantage to ensure that …
Democracy, as everyone knows, requires freedom of speech so that public opinion, which is sovereign, may freely be formed to direct its servant, which is the government. As a matter of constitutional history, the First Amendment began effectively to safeguard …
Assumptions of how the U.S. economy functions have been made obsolete by the globalization of production and finance. For example, large U.S. budget deficits did not spur economic growth in the United States, as one might have expected, because imported …
A decade ago there appeared in English translation a remarkable little book, At the Mind’s Limits, by Jean Amery. It was a book that struck many of its readers as one of the most thoughtful and abrasively honest reflections (to …
In the 1990s, if the optimists are right and the world is lucky, someone will be able to write the history of AIDS. If the epidemic has peaked by then—and some observers argue that this has already happened—we will still …
Can you think of a time in this century,” asked a Democratic party activist, “when the Democrats were in worse shape than they are now?” “Yes,” I answered, “the 1920s.” One would have to go back to the uninspired Democratic …
Economists can predict few things in this world with certainty. Despite our confident manner, we really do not know what the unemployment rate will be in six months or what interest rates will be in a year. Or whether in …
The laissez-faire attitude of the Reagan administration unleashed a wave of corporate mergers, takeovers, and buyouts that has made some financial whizzes wealthy, transformed the face of American business, and wreaked havoc with many industrial cities in the Midwest and …
It is only human to give our enemies a distinct territory in our memory, which is why we hear the buzz of summer’s first mosquito with alarm. We think only fools don’t remember their enemies, because remembering is preparedness. And, …
In April the federal Department of Labor (DOL) announced it had undercounted the number of violations of the child labor law found in a three-day sweep conducted the month before. The department revised the number of violations, from 7,000 to …
The Sykaos Papers by E. P. Thompson Pantheon Books, 1988, 490 pp., $19.95 An alien, Oi Paz, from the ultrarational, computer-directed society of the planet Oitar, crash-lands on Earth. Here he becomes a pawn in a cold war power struggle, …
Political and Social Writings by Cornelius Castoriadis, translated and edited by David Ames Curtis, 2 vols. University of Minnesota, 1988, 347 pp., and 362 pp., $14.95 each To open the pages of these two volumes is to breathe the stale …
Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective by Richard M. Fried Oxford University Press, 1990, 229 pp., $22.95 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy described McCarthyism as “Americanism with the gloves off,” but few students of this century’s second red scare …
The catastrophe of historical communism is, literally, before our eyes: the catastrophe of communism as a world movement, born from the Russian revolution, promising emancipation of the poor, the oppressed, the “wretched of the earth.” Its dissolution gathers speed, outdistancing …
