The conclusions of the Kerner Commission Report on the urban riots during the late 1960s have been widely accepted; namely that this angry black urban upheaval was driven by a gnawing alienation and despair among mainly working-class and poor Afro-Americans. …
“Socialism,” writes Michael Harrington, “is the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face in the twenty-first century. Socialism?” he asks in the same breath: “How can a nostalgic irrelevance be the …
Steven P. Erie’s Rainbow’s End is a major study of Irish-American political organizations in eight cities. Although the focus of Erie’s book is on the forces behind the successes and failures of such powerful figures as Richard Daley, James Michael …
Fifty years ago Neville Chamberlain emerged from his airplane, gestured with his umbrella, and announced to his anxious countrymen that the abject surrender he had just signed in Munich would assure them what the Prayer Book pleads for, “peace in …
Ten years ago I tried to interpret Mexico for Ilan and Irving Howe in a single day. I took them to Aztec ruins and to markets where indigenous customs live on virtually intact. We strolled through the center of Mexico …
When John Rawls began writing A Theory of Justice in the 1950s, philosophers were busy lamenting the death of political philosophy. Grand political theories, Bernard Crick observed, were treated like “corpses for students to practice dissection upon.” Some philosophers, calling …
In the late fifties marrying an economic equal was neither necessary nor possible. Most middle-class—or for that matter, blue-collar working class—men could expect to earn enough to support a wife and children. Moreover, most women who intended to marry and …
In The Rebel Camus seeks to criticize “the astonishing history of European pride” that laid the groundwork for both Nazism and Stalinism and that lies at the heart of our contemporary sense of moral confusion. The book reverberates with echoes …
I wish to inquire into an ancient theme, that of the microfoundation of a democratic society, the exemplary constitution of the democratic, rather than of Adorno’s authoritarian, personality. I realize that the formation of that sort of personality is like …
The trouble with undercover police operations, Gary Marx’s excellent new book might lead us to conclude, is that they breed government waste: not waste of time or money so much as of human personality and integrity of the law itself. …
I used to be an admirer of Eugene McCarthy. While Senator from Minnesota, he was just about the first prominent figure in the political establishment to come out unambiguously against the Vietnam War. When he started to campaign for the …
The Conference on Critical Legal Studies (CLS) came into being in Madison, Wisconsin in 1977, during a meeting of legal scholars and practitioners dissatisfied with “mainstream” law. Since then “crits” have become one of the most important—and controversial—groups within the …
What follows may sometimes sound an irritated note. I am sorry about that, but have to admit that it is one of the objects of this essay to express a certain irritation with the terms in which some recent debates …
An earnest but ignorant undergraduate once wandered into a used book sale. Having some interest in political theory, he picked up a copy of Harold Laski’s The Rise of Liberalism: The Philosophy of a Business Civilization (1936). He didn’t know …
Since the appearance of François Furet’s Penser la Revolution Française in 1978, conventional wisdom concerning the French Revolution has fallen upon hard times. For quite some time such “conventional wisdom” has been left wing. In the nineteenth century the Revolution …
