One day, not soon, the welfare state will extend its benefits to all those men and women who are at present its occasional victims, its nominal or partial members. That day will not be the end of political history. But …
A survey commissioned by the AFL–CIO Committee on Political Education, and conducted by the Joseph Kraft polling organization in January 1967, offers rich information about the state of union membership. Ostensibly commissioned to prove that the rank and file is overwhelmingly …
Though many of the young and idealistic radicals of this generation may be convinced that “participatory democracy” is a revolutionary concept of their own making, a re-reading of Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals will remind us that the essential idea …
Many well-intentioned Americans are deceiving themselves and the public when they speak of abolishing the slums. The slums can be abolished, but not in the way they suggest. A number of programs have been proposed to end the scandal of …
The spirals of confrontation and force which marked recent campus demonstrations against Dow interviewers, military recruiters, and Johnson Administration spokesmen have raised serious issues regarding academic freedom. SDS and its allies have announced an abrupt turn “from ‘mere protest’ to …
Georges Friedmann is a Frenchman, humanist, intellectual, distinguished sociologist, Jew. I choose the order of these modifying nouns deliberately, for Friedmann, like so many assimilated Jewish intellectuals and social scientists at work in Western Europe in the period between the …
I have two objections to Michael Walzees stimulating essay. Though Walzer’s main thrust is that tactical considerations are typically relevant to a moral estimate of civil disobedience, he allows an important exception: civil disobedience as personal protest need not be evaluated …
The “new economics” are clearly in. Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the commander in chief, the intellectual establishment, the fourth estate, indeed all who matter are now Keynesians. This is no minor accomplishment; compare the 25 years it took Congress to learn …
The “long, hot summer” of racial turmoil was succeeded by the short but intense autumn of teachers’ struggles. In a series of cities and states tens of thousands of teachers fought for union recognition, an improvement in school conditions, and …
In a recent New Yorker, Richard Rovere made these points: 1) there is no basic difference between the Korean and the Vietnamese wars; 2) nor is the different reaction to both due to the more developed techniques of reporting; 3) …
On February 18, 1967, the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer came to an end. Its history, probed with such agonizing detail in the 1954 AEC Security Board Hearings, dramatizes the dilemma of the American scientist in the twentieth century. To appreciate …
This collection of essays, which displays the author at work in a variety of settings, includes one piece that originally appeared in Dissent (“The Village Beat Scene: Summer 1960”), some scholarly papers, and various other material. Polsky manages to be …
A specter is haunting the imagination of commentators upon the contemporary scene, the specter of the “new poor.” In days of old (precise time conveniently unspecified), the cliché goes, the immigrant saw poverty as a temporary state and looked forward to …
As I write the slum areas of several dozen large American cities have been ravaged by Negro rioters and by the cops and guardsmen who put them down. For urban Negroes, the pull-back of the poverty program may have been …
“Take over NCNP!” begged a headline in the New Politics News, the convention bulletin of the National Conference for a New Politics, which convened in Chicago on August 30 to create some sort of “organization and action”—possibly a third ticket …
