Stanley Fish, the Duke University Arts and Sciences professor of English, chair of the Duke English Department, distinguished professor of law, and self-described “academic leftist,” has just finished a dazzling performance. The overflow audience at Princeton has sat rapt as …
The Berlin Wall dismantled; religious ceremonies shown on Soviet television; the people of Romania overthrow Ceausescu; both Germanys announce plans to cut their armies by half over the next decade; European business plans to enter the huge new market. A …
Ten years from now, will there still be a Central Europe? Or will Europe’s center, suddenly reemerging as the Soviet tide recedes, find itself submerged once more by a Western tide? The end came so abruptly: what now? Amid the …
The rapid advance of democratization in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, still underway as I write, is surely one of the most extraordinary revolutions in the long history of democracy. Just as no one, to my knowledge, predicted the …
The specter of civil war is often raised in prognostications about the future of the Soviet Union, the great guessing game of the late twentieth century. When asked about the possibility, Andrei Sakharov could only gasp and quote Pushkin: “God …
The old disputes between right and left still stir emotions. In one of the first European parliaments, His Majesty’s opponents sat on his left (clearly, the worse side), while the supporters of Dynasty, Law, and Order were seated to his …
Vineland is a requiem for Pynchon’s sixties generation and the politics and culture it produced. It offers an America of those who have searched for self-transcendence along opposing ideological paths: the yearners for power and position who in the eighties …
We are saddened by the news that Hal Draper died this past January in Berkeley, California, at age seventy-five. Though our relations were strained by political differences—or differences in emphasis— we recall the many years of friendship as participants in …
Does anyone remember why the United States invaded Panama? The day after the invasion, President Bush supplied his reasons. “The goals of the United States,” he said, “have been to safeguard the lives of Americans, to defend democracy in Panama, …
On the morning of August 28, 1968, I left my Washington home and headed by car for the seaside resort of Rehoboth, Maryland. I remember starting out in high spirits: there was not a cloud in the sky, and I …
Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” is surely one of the genuine Great Ideas of history, both for its intrinsic intellectual content and for its durable influence on ideologies, politics, and public policies. The proposition that the alchemy of market competition transmutes …
As we enter the 1990s, the outline of the twenty-first century, with respect to the configuration of issues and forces, already seems clear. We can identify four: 1. The collapse of communism 2. The reunification of Europe 3. The end …
It is argued that normal science grows incrementally, each development building on that which came before. Indeed, we would have no science without attention to the accumulated wisdom of our predecessors (leaps of imagination notwithstanding) leading to paradigmatic changes. No …
As the cold war winds down questions arise: How much should the defense budget be cut, and what should be done with the money freed? What will be the effect of such cuts on an economy in which the share …
For almost two generations Local 1199, a militant union of poor and minority hospital workers, has been extolled both as a force for change in its members’ lives and as an advocate for progressive policies in urban and union politics. …
