A completely egalitarian society strikes me as so utopian as to be beyond policy-oriented discussion. If all incomes were equal, it is doubtful that the most unpleasant and taxing jobs would be filled, and if all power were equalized, it …
In The Sleeping-Car Murders, Costa-Gavras’s exciting if rather conventional first movie, the hero was a Parisian detective desperately trying to solve a “perfect” murder. With the hindsight provided by three films, we can see that for Costa-Gavras the detective’s desire …
I am in the course of this lecture going to refer to a few of the socialists I most admire—Morris, Tawney, Titmuss, Rita Hinden herself. I will start with William Morris. “On this then I take my stand as a …
Last Tango in Paris is an expressionist film in the line of Fritz Lang, Jean-Luc Godard, and Paddy Chayefsky. To admit this at the outset is to minimize any risk of understanding the phenomenon too quickly. Expressionism, after all, seeks …
At the very center of conservative thought lies this idea: that the present division of wealth and power corresponds to some deeper reality of human life. Conservatives don’t want to say merely that the present division is what it ought …
The word “censorship” immediately provokes a hostile reaction since traditionally it indicates the intention of authorities, whether clerical or secular, to curtail freedom. The very essence of Western technological civilization is incompatible with censorship, for the latter presupposes an authority …
SDS, by Kirkpatrick Sale. New York: Random House. 752 pp. The rise, fall, and further fall of Students for a Democratic Society during the sixties is more than another melancholy footnote to the failed radical movements in America. While it …
That great class of people, mothers, will be a mere specialty group by the year 2000, and women will be a postindustrial elite. Though it may seem as if this came about as a result of the women’s liberation movement, …
The three political fathers of the idea of a United Europe—Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gasperi—had each experienced excesses of nationalism that made them sense the urgency of devising a political solution for nationalistic confrontations. Schuman was a …
The phrase “quality of life” seems to defy definition. As the battle cry of the ecology movement, it has acquired a multitude of connotations. Yet an attempt is underway not only to define but to measure the quality of life— …
American blacks have made such remarkable progress since the inception of the New Frontier that their current condition is far better than most people realize, according to Scammon and Wattenberg, spokesmen for the “center” of the Democratic party. Replying in …
The seemingly uncontrollable movement of American policy toward domestic repression and imperial warfare makes it of the utmost urgency that we understand what is involved in our “new conservatism.” The most perceptive understanding may come not from a hurried look …
At the corner of 15th Street and Union Square West, on June 1, James Morrissey and Ralph Ibrahim, two seamen, watched outside the Amalgamated Bank while bags of ballots were loaded from the vault onto a truck for delivery to …
I AM NOT, I HOPE, INDULGING in that most middle-aged of pastimes, boasting of how terrible things were when I was young. And yet, it must be said that, for all the current talk of repression in American society, what …
THE POLITICS OF UNREASON, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab. New York: Harper & Row. 547 pages. $12.50. FEW SCHOLARS HAVE INFLUENCED our thinking about “extremism” as much as Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of social relations at Harvard. The …
