. Here, Maurice Cranston reviews the man's hfe and work.
Among the philosophers of the modem world, John Locke has always been held in especially high regard in America. His influence on the Founding Fathers exceeded that of any other thinker. And the characteristically American attitude toward politics-indeed, toward life-can still be thought of as "Lockean," with its deep attachment to the rule of law, to equal rights to life, liberty, and property, to work and enterprise, to religious...
y W. Morton
In "The Exchange," a story by the late Yuri Trifonov, a pop- ular Russian writer who often dealt with the stratagems of the Soviet urban middle class, a Moscow woman changes her offi- cial apartment registration and legally moves in with her hus- band's dying mother-whom she hates.
She makes the shift for one important reason: to prevent the old lady's precious single room from reverting, upon her death, to the state. The woman reckons that, through the bartering sys- tem...
In August 1978, while visiting the Soviet Union, I decided to take the local train from Moscow to Vladimir, the capital of a former princedom some 100 miles to the east.
At Moscow's Kursk station, a rather disheveled man in his mid-30s boarded the crowded car and proceeded to address his fellow riders. "Comrades," he began, "would you help me?" He then went on to relate how, as an epileptic, he could find no steady work and was surviving on a pension of a mere 25 rubles a...
shortages of reli- able information, a secretive politi- cal system, and a history and culture that present a tangle of Western and Oriental influences.
Enigma number one, writes Ox- ford's Ronald Hingley, is The Rus- sian Mind (Scribner's, 1977). Ivan the Terrible, the great 16th-century tsar, was imperious enough to order the slaughter of an elephant that failed to bow to him, yet too supersti- tious to order the arrest of a "lunatic naked monk" who wandered the countryside denouncing...
A technological age-especially an extremely brilliant and suc- cessful one-has difficulty in finding a proper role for literature. Such a society sees literature as a diversion, as a mere amuse- ment at best; and so it is classed as a luxury, perhaps an added grace to adorn the high culture that the technology itself has built. Yet such homage obscures the real importance of litera- ture and all of the humanities. It classes them as decorative lux- uries, whereas in truth they are the necessary...
scholars than the 1829-1837 Presidency of Andrew Jackson. The craggy Tennessee general was the first man out- side the colonial gentry to reach the White House. His life was tumultuous. (How many Chief Executives had once fought duels and even killed a man?) But so were his times. Modern political parties, corporations, and a vigorous press all emerged, as did something called Jacksonian Democracy. Yet what was that ex- actly? During the 1920s, historian Carl Russell Fish christened the era the...