Between the two Soldiers’ Field meetings, a massive student defection from the SDS position took place. In part, the call to discontinue the strike sprang from weariness and the fear of academic abortion that haunts all of us. Yet it is important to realize that there was a definite element of political rationality in the […]
Category: Politics and Society
Toward An Ethic of Political Conduct
Any system of political ethics has two functions. 1) To serve as a guide for one’s personal political conduct and 2) to enable one to consider the actions of political bodies, governments, in the past or the present, which in turn would have implications for individual behavior. Max Weber, in his fundamental essay, “Politics as […]
Back to the Basics-Theoretics
There are different definitions of “class” in political theory. My prefered one is that a class is determined by its objective material conditions. Thus, depending on the kind of house you live in and the amount of money you have to spend on food you are a member of a certain class. The potential difficulty […]
A Radical Vision
RADICALS view American society as being dominated by a relatively small group of people–an elite, more or less tightly co-ordinated, that benefits considerably from the present system. Under this upper crust lies a vast semi-oppressed white lumpenproletariat and a clearly oppressed black proletariat. Such an analysis of the situation leads a radical to the conclusion […]
The Old Mole
IN AN ARTICLE entitled ‘Sexual Role Exploitation,’ in the first issue of The Old Mole, the writer suggests that one way of restoring dignity to male-female relationships is to have girls pay their own expenses when they go out with boys. This idea is sensible since it would assure that girls would go out only […]
The Digger Papers
The magazine, The Realist, made its name ten years ago (didn’t know it was going that long did you?) as a scurrilous irreverent underground rag. In its latest issue though, Paul Krassner, the organization’s guiding light, has turned to the more elevated purpose of spreading the hippies good word. The diggers, that nimble group of […]
Presidential Sack?
THERE is no institution so perfect that it cannot be subjected to calm criticism. The office of the Presidency of the United States, despite its hallowed aura, is in need of such scrutiny because it has become too intensely concentrated a center of power. Worse, the Presidency has come to be viewed by the public […]
A Proposal For Educational Reform: Reading Period First, Lectures After
THE lecture system at Harvard gives Professors a chance to develop their ideas on some chosen topic at length and regularly over a period of time. It is far superior to the British, system, say, in which lectures are sporadic events to be made use of or not as the mood strikes one. Nevertheless, the […]
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Beyond Bundy
MCGEORGE Bundy haunted Harvard last week, bringing back with him a conception of society and man’s role in it that has recently come to be discredited around here. His argument, astringent and eloquent was, despite weaknesses, ultimately reassuring. The Godkin topic was “To Govern for Freedom in an Age of Explosions,” and Bundy’s message was […]
The Politics of Culture
THE fork of “liberalization” that is jabbing all of Communist Europe these days has two prongs: “Cultural Freedom” and “Political Liberty.” It is easy in an advanced capitalist country to forget sometimes how closely inter-related the two are. European Communist reformers, however, have never lost sight of this close connection–indeed, they sometimes disguise their political […]