Essays

The writers of our Constitution did not mean for this country to be a representative democracy, but it has been transformed into one over the last two centuries. However, the transformation remains a work in progress – and one, which is currently experiencing another wave of backsliding. Who, including those long ago writers would have…

The French philosopher Louis Althusser’s structuralist Marxism remains a point of reference for many contemporary schools of radical thought, even for some of those that have moved away from Marxism completely.  Moreover, as radical thought has experienced a partial return to Marx after several decades of Nietzschean post-structuralism, the legacy of Althusser lies in wait,…

In the late winter of 1957-58, while I had just begun courses at NYU Law School, a manuscript landed on the desk of my mother, Frances Green, who at that time was General Manager of Commentary, as she had been since the magazine’s founding in 1946. As General Manager, she was in charge of the…

Wavy Gravy (aka Hugh Mooney), the Hog Farm activist and musician, once said, “if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t really there.” Wavy may have been on a lengthy acid trip, but the rest of us clearly remember the 60’s as an era of assassinations, civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, the beginnings of the…