Left-wing literary people talk more these days about criticism than about fiction or poetry or plays. The statement sounds too flat to be true, and it is fair to ask what “left-wing” signifies in the context. I am using it …
As soon as Ronald Reagan became president, he set out to deliver private enterprise from the bondage of regulation. As the authors of A Season of Spoils explain, his thoughts on the matter were straightforward: Industrial production results in wealth …
The politics of the battered women’s movement brings together a number of vital concerns: the role of the state in intimate relations, feminist analyses of male violence and power, and the ways political activists and professional “social service providers” variously …
With considerable help from Soviet troops as the war drew toward its end, the new [Titoist] regime found, in Belgrade, a permanent home at last. Our exhausted political leaders, famished for creature comforts, rushed to take advantage of the blessings …
A specter is haunting American capitalism—the specter of unrestrained greed. So it appears from a story by Anne Crittenden in the New York Times (August 19, 1984). She reports the fears expressed by many academic and business luminaries ranging from …
Just when you thought you’d heard too many complex arguments about “comparable worth,” Michael Levin, Commentary‘s antifeminist-in-residence, comes along to simplify matters. It’s all a plot to destroy capitalism and establish socialism (Michael Levin, “Comparable Worth: The Feminist Road to …
Last May I attended a lecture by Laurent Fabius, then minister of industry and now prime minister, at one of the fairly exclusive left-wing private political clubs in Paris. The audience consisted largely of academics, civil servants, and political journalists. …
In the gloom of present-day politics, socialists may well lose themselves in nostalgic dreams of fraternity. We feel hemmed in by a world of self-interest, and we experience the daily weakening of those bonds of class and community that gave …
The task of Zionism is very nearly completed. That is to say, the problem that Zionism set out to address is just about solved. Soon we will be living in a post-Zionist era, and there will no longer be a …
When I was growing up in a small town outside of Detroit, I spent the usual amount of time playing war games. The one I remember best was a non-nuclear, domestic version of an imaginary “World War III,” pitting me …
Alfred Kazin’s new book is one of those largescale thematic studies in which a prominent critic offers a summing-up of American literary culture. Both the book’s approach and its thesis are closely related to what used to be called “wisdom …
Where in the United States can we point to even a single well-planned communitarian experiment that has the virtues of being plural, open, secular, and democratic? When I survey the vast urban-industrial wasteland of contemporary America, I often ask myself …
Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, the worst crises any contemporary voter remembers. During his 12 years in office, moreover, Democrats and Republicans sorted themselves into the ideological pattern that still …
I’ve always been a collector, and when I was a kid I had what was undoubtedly the best collection of toy soldiers in the neighborhood. Boxes and boxes of them, occupying a sizable part of the basement. It was my …
Michael Walzer’s penetrating article on Camus in the Fall 1984 Dissent (“Commitment & Social Criticism: Camus’s Algerian War”), is a very convincing defense of that much-maligned writer’s position during the French-Algerian war, when he refused to ally himself, unlike the …
