Our literary establishment seems designed to ensure that a writer’s first novel is his best. Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron and J.D. Salinger are only a few of the better-known novelists whose first work defined the acme of their creative careers. (In the case of John Barth, the second novel, The End of the...
Words like liberal and conservative have been losing whatever meaning they once had. An old Tory would not have seen anything very conservative in free trade, and Senator Bob Taft would certainly have had reservations about America’s role as international policeman. But liber al still has discernible significance in ethics, where the great liberal traditions of Locke, Adam Smith, and the Utilitarians...
The worst thing that can happen to most idealists is to realize their ideals: they have no one to blame the consequences on–except themselves. This is the figure Michael Harrington cuts in The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization (New York; Holt, Rinehart & Winston). As a “democratic Marxist” and atheist, Harrington...