In a celebrated passage of “The Economic Ethic of World Religions,” Max Weber remarked that often, “like switchmen,” the “world images” created by ideas have “determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.” In …
In a poem called “Fall 1961,” Robert Lowell wrote: All autumn, the chafe and jar of nuclear war; we have talked our extinction to death. These words, provoked by a Berlin crisis, suggest that it is possible to kill a …
John Dunn’s peculiar book purports to address two problems. The first is how to explain the attraction of socialism in advanced capitalist nations and the second whether socialism is “still a rational and civilizing form of political enterprise in these …
Just down the hall from a door marked “20th Century Fox,” on the third floor of a nondescript office building on the edge of downtown Washington, D.C., are the offices of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Controversy has regularly …
The intellectual is a modern phenomenon. I do not mean that there was no intellectual work before the modern era; rather, in other times intellectual work was not undertaken so self-consciously or as a task justifying one’s existence. Now it …
The dramatis personae in Joanne Barkan’s analysis of the contemporary Italian workers’ movement possess great subtlety and substance. There is a Communist party (PCI) that, even reluctant observers admit, has been unusually lucid in the face of social and political …
Neither liar nor squealer, Jonathan Rieder is something perhaps equally problematic in this book: an ethnographer with an argument, reaching for readers politically engaged. “Any coalition that fails to understand the grievances that collected in places like Canarsie all across …
The Workers’ Defense Committee represented not only a specific idea of social action but also a certain style of action, which was refined gradually over the course of several years… Above all, KOR meant social and not political activity; this …
This is more than just another movie. In the first few weeks after it opened, it became the third biggest money grosser in Hollywood history, and may eventually top the list. Time magazine soon reported on the “spin-offs” it generated, …
“Dodge Main”—the name of the huge Chrysler plant in Hamtramck—was often the first English phrase learned by Poles arriving in Detroit. Over half a century it produced 14 million cars and helped integrate into mainstream society successive waves of immigrants …
The Hungarians arrived among us, not in a trickle but all at once. In the space of two months, May and June 1944, they invaded the Lager, convoy after convoy, filling the void that the Germans had not neglected to …
Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is more than nine hours long; but long before you understand what is present in this visual account of Auschwitz you understand what is missing from all the others. The others—all the sickening photographs of the living …
The massive resistance to apartheid in South Africa shows few, if any, signs of abating. From the state of emergency declaration of July 20, 1985 (exempting all security forces from legal responsibility for acts of brutality) until mid-October approximately 250 …
Mainstream capitalist economics has become, among other things, a language. I do not mean simply that economists employ a professional jar- gon. How could they not? Between Economese and ordinary English there are more than differences of vocabulary; there are …
In this short and very readable book Ryszard Kapuściński offers us lively, snapshot descriptions of scenes from the life and 37-year reign of the last King of Kings together with a dramaturgical perspective on the revolution that put an end …
