Not since they encountered it in nursery rhymes have references to the market so intruded into the consciousness of Americans as in recent months. There is now a virtual consensus that the market is the natural state of economic affairs, …
In our thinking about the economic changes underway in Poland, we seem overly impressed by the wealth of the United States and Western Europe, where market forces rule (though not exclusively). We tend to forget that there are other countries …
In November 1963 forty members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) gathered in the small Mississippi town of Greenville for three days of meetings. The result was a decision that would bring over one thousand volunteers—most of them white— …
Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation by Alan Wolfe University of California Press, 1989, 371 pp., $25.00 Adam Smith became professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1752. To hold such a professorship in that time …
Nothing in our past thinking, or in anyone else’s, prepared us for the remarkable turn of events in the Soviet Union. So much the worse for theory, so much the better for life! The word “historic” has been reduced to …
We are pleased to print below a chapter from Time of Change, by Roy Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa (translated from the Italian by Michael Moore), a richly detailed account of the Gorbachev years in the Soviet Union. Medvedev is, of …
The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism by Cornel West University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, 279 pp., Cornel West is a smart fellow who has written a difficult but challenging book. It is impossible to read The American …
Now that the exhilaration of glasnost is wearing off and the problems of perestroika grow acute, there is a striking change of response to Gorbachev. Wise men shake their heads. They mutter, with crocodile regret or burbling delight, that he …
Guillermo Ungo is general secretary of the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) of El Salvador, a social democratic group. The interview below was conducted by Patrick Lacefield, national organizational director of Democratic Socialists of America. —EDS. PL: Can you evaluate the …
During the season of its first flowering, at the outset of this decade, Halina Bortnowska, one of the foremost theorists of Polish Solidarity, characterized the movement as an expression of the country’s “subjectivity,” by which, she went on to explain, …
Roger and Me, a radical documentary — marketed as a comedy —about the devastation of auto workers in Flint, Michigan, has, to everyone’s amazement, become a sleeper. At this moment it’s making pretty big bucks. Why? Go ask. Documentaries, let …
This is the bystander administration, the peripheral presidency. As the world is redefined, the United States has largely absented itself from the recreation. Washington, where government is less inclined to action than at any time since the 1920s, has virtually …
What happened to us between 1956 and 1989? Not much, only our time passed by. We did go back to see the more tepid and longer version of the same old show. Restrictions on our freedom of expression and movement …
I do not take the main issue to be “the canon.” The word itself is misleading as well as solemn, and I used article was something different: the relation of individual thought to the reading of good books. I still …
Communism has given socialism a bad name. Years of tyranny and brutality, now brought to an end almost everywhere by popular rebellions, have colored, perhaps permanently, our view of state-run economies and enforced egalitarianism. What has been called by some …
