The life of Afro-American intellectuals is governed by a web of contradictions. Simply put, there is this central contradiction: while black intellectuals work within the aesthetic limits of a pariah-like ethnicity, this ethnicity’s cultural forms are used and exploited—both intellectually …
In mid-October the Nicaraguan government announced a suspension of civil liberties, including the rights to free expression, free assembly, and privacy in the use of postal services. With these measures has come a new stringency in the censorship of the …
In a 1980 landmark case, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision, held that an independent association of faculty members at Yeshiva University in New York City, a private institution, was “managerial” and not entitled to the jurisdiction of …
Equality and justice are central to the idea of democratic socialism, yet their relationship to the organization of work and the division of labor has always been problematic. For Marx, transforming the process of production was a requirement for a …
To the many progressive reforms advocated in America shortly before World War I, some intellectuals could give partial sympathy but not whole-hearted commitment. Radical young intellectuals, fueled by Wells, Shaw, and Whitman, calling themselves socialists and Bergsonians, and scorning all …
To understand why we’ve arrived at our present impasse in dealing with crime, we must first reconsider the assumptions that have guided the dominant policies on crime in America through most of the past decade. This means taking a hard …
By now there is a large literature available in English on the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and its aftermath. Nevertheless, Milan Simecka’s The Restoration of Order, written eight years ago and circulated by Czechoslovakia’s Samizdat, has only recently been translated …
Michael Piore and Charles Sabel have written a book that is both enormously insightful and deeply irritating. These two qualities are so tightly intertwined that it is not a question of directing readers to the good parts and warning them …
This biography of Ilya Ehrenburg is the first serious attempt to assess the career of one of the most controversial men of our century. A writer and journalist by profession, Ehrenburg was widely regarded during the Stalin years as Russia’s …
Questions about corporate takeovers become more and more insistent. There is a fear that takeovers sap America’s competitive strength and contribute to an unhealthy obsession with short-term growth. While defenders of takeovers have taken the position that few negative effects …
HERSH SMOLAR, a native of Poland and a much-decorated Resistance hero, was head of the Minsk ghetto underground during World War II and a member of the high command of an entire Partisan zone comprising four brigades. After the war …
The American labor movement is being battered by tides of change. Union membership as a proportion of the total work force is down; relative wages are declining; hard-won work rules are being surrendered; and employers are sowing the seeds of …
On May 9, 1974, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rock critic Jon Landau heard Bruce Springsteen for the first time in concert. In a now famous endorsement, he testified: “I saw my rock and roll past flash before my eyes. And…I saw …
Lewis did most of the talking. His voice was low, and he spoke with passion. He outlined the conditions in all of the major industries of the country. He emphasized that thousands upon thousands of workers were waiting with outstretched …
Christianity did not “die” in the 19th century. Millions held fast to the faith; churches survived; theological controversies flourished. Yet we can now see that in the decades after the Enlightenment Christianity suffered deep wounds that could not be healed, …
