Since at least antiquity, animals have been used to illustrate the “natural” reasons for human behavior in both the economic and sexual spheres. Our own follies and foibles are thereby projected onto the animal world, where they lead a colorful …
What the poor win in American politics, they win by mass defiance, not by the use of the regular political system”; in their book Poor People’s Movements, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward draw this lesson from the study of …
America is at a turning point. The radical nature of the period is recognized even by conservatives. When he was sworn in as secretary of the Treasury last summer, G. William Miller said that the nation had “inherited the most …
Calling a book a popularization is usually taken as an unkind remark. This is mostly a matter of snobbery: the popularizer is writing for the masses and, therefore, his work must lack depth and sophistication. But popularizations need not be …
Having time on my hands, I sent away to the FBI for my dossier to which I am entitled under the Freedom of Information Act. I was sure I had a dossier (pronounced doezher by the FBI), because many years …
For some time, welfare-state capitalism has been on the defensive. Programs that were taken for granted now face destructive budget cuts, and crude individualistic theorists have won the initiative in public debate. Peter Albin argues that this second-class status of …
A Correction Editors: In my article, “What is Political Equality” (Dissent, Summer 1979), I referred to an allegedly “crude formulation” of Nelson Polsby’s, “that if, say, poor people fail to vote in large numbers, it must be because they think …
Israel’s political and social life is still reeling from the impact of two seemingly contradictory developments unforeseen by even the most knowledgeable pundits: first, the end of 30 years of Labor’s hegemony in the 1977 elections, and second, Sadat’s visit …
Unlike most books by former athletes, Dallas Cowboy wide receiver Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty is anything but a modest “I was there” piece of writing. Although structured around eight days in the life of Phil Elliott (like Gent, a …
Americans do not meditate on History; they dream about fresh starts and wide horizons. We are an impatient people, pragmatic to our bones, eager to get on with the business of getting on. It is hardly surprising that our response …
In a quaint Easter day speech delivered in 1943, Eamon de Valera, patriarchal prime minister of the Irish Free State (it became the Republic of Ireland in 1949), described his cherished vision of a self-sufficient nation—replete with comely maidens, cozy …
Harvey Swados’s On the Line appeared in the fall of 1957, barely noticed among the long-running best sellers of the day, By Love Possessed, Peyton Place, and On the Beach, or among the works of fiction that were just beginning …
There is an increasingly widespread feeling in Congress, among informed sectors of public opinion and, surprisingly, even among many strategic analysts, that U.S. nuclear forces have grown far beyond any rational purpose, that we have far more than we need …
The following comment, slightly abbreviated, is reprinted with the author’s permission from the New York Post. In their new incarnation, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda talk brightly of “a new political era” in which California Gov. Jerry Brown—subject to change …
Israel’s political and social life is still reeling from the impact of two seemingly contradictory developments unforeseen by even the most knowledgeable pundits: first, the end of 30 years of Labor’s hegemony in the 1977 elections, and second, Sadat’s visit …
