The collapse of communist systems has not eliminated the need for a better understanding of the impact they had and how and why they persisted. Only in the aftermath of their unraveling has it become possible to gain insight into these matters as books earlier suppressed are published and as the people of the former...
While M. Revel’s critique of Western leftists and fellow travelers is fully shared by me, I part company with him when it comes to the issue of the durability of communist systems. Both he and I were among the vast number of observers and critics of such regimes who did not anticipate their spectacular and...
Who would have predicted that while socialist-realist art forms disappeared from most communist systems (even before the systems themselves collapsed), didactic and politicized movies and other products of mass culture would proliferate in the United States through the 1970’s and 80’s? Similar ironies can be found in regard to Marxist scholarship, which in Eastern Europe...
Are political pilgrimages a matter of history, or has the phenomenon survived? If so, in what form? Some reference to these questions has been made in the preface to the (1983) paperback edition of my book Political Pilgrims, but the years that have passed since then call for further reflections on this matter. History has...
“You . . . have been borrowing goblins from the capitalist. . . . “ —John Ruskin For numerous well-known Western intellectuals, capitalism versus socialism remains the great dilemma, the principal philosophical and institutional alternative of our times. It is far from self-evident why this should be the case. Why not political pluralism as opposed...
“Long promise and short observance is the road that leads to the sure triumph.” – Dante Inequality under socialism—or under putative socialism—remains largely unknown and barely under stood in the West even by the educated public. If by now the political practices of countries insisting on being called socialist (sometimes even democratic) are better grasped,...
I visited Western Europe recently to learn more about the critical attitudes of intellectuals and other opinion makers (primarily academics and journalists) toward the United States. I was especially interested in how such European critiques resembled those produced by American intellectuals. I also wanted lo learn something about the connections between animosity toward the U.S....