Spring 1993
China at Dynasty's End
In Essence
as much as 50 percent between 1983 and '88, are on the rebound. The economy has begun to grow again.
So successful have the reforms been that the Economist (Feb. 13, 1993) declares that President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who took office in 1988, "has a claim to be hailed as one of the great men of the 20th century." It is a tribute to how far Salinas has taken Mexico that the 24-member Organiza- tion for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is taking seriously the application...
"Whose Body Politic?" b Alan Wolfe, in The American Prospect (Winter 1993) p.6. Box 383080, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
Without Ronald Reagan and the Cold War to unite them, conservatives today are badly divided over sor. But today, Andrew Reding, a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute, writes in World Policy Journal (Spring 1991), "the culture of presidencialismo appears more naked than at any time since the ill-fated reign of Porfirio Diaz," the dictator overthrown i...
Robert E. Gilbert, in The Sci-ences (Jan.-Feb. 1993), New York Acad. of Sciences, Two E.63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) is remembered as an indifferent president who favored short workdays and long naps. When he died, only four years after leaving the White House, writer Dorothy Parker asked: "How can they tell?" But Northeastern Uni- versity political scientist Gilbert says that Silent Cal had not always been so given to lassitude.
Elected governor of Massachusetts...
Robert E. Gilbert, in The Sci-ences (Jan.-Feb. 1993), New York Acad. of Sciences, Two E.63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) is remembered as an indifferent president who favored short workdays and long naps. When he died, only four years after leaving the White House, writer Dorothy Parker asked: "How can they tell?" But Northeastern Uni- versity political scientist Gilbert says that Silent Cal had not always been so given to lassitude.
Elected governor of Massachusetts...
Charles 1. Dunlap, Jr., in Parameters (Winter 1992- 93), U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pa. 17013-5050.
The year is 2012 and the White House is abruptly taken over General Thomas E. T. Brutus, heretofore merely the uniformed chief of the unified armed forces. Upon the president's death and the vice president's
not entirely voluntary retirement, Brutus declares martial law, postpones elections, and names himself permanent Military Plenipotentiary. The coup is rati- fied in...
Charles 1. Dunlap, Jr., in Parameters (Winter 1992- 93), U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pa. 17013-5050.
The year is 2012 and the White House is abruptly taken over General Thomas E. T. Brutus, heretofore merely the uniformed chief of the unified armed forces. Upon the president's death and the vice president's
not entirely voluntary retirement, Brutus declares martial law, postpones elections, and names himself permanent Military Plenipotentiary. The coup is rati- fied in...
American weapons until after the war. Shrewd adversaries will locate their military bases in civilian areas or near cultural and religious landmarks. All of Amer- ica's weapons, the authors warn "will do little to dissuade an antagonist who knows that we like neither to suffer nor inflict casualties, military or civilian." At some point, they predict, the United States will be unable even to contemplate war, and "isolation will eventually be our answer."
The New Wisdom on M...
Richard R. Nelson and Gavin Wright, in Journal of Eco- nomic Literature (Dec. 1992), American Economic Assoc., 2014 Broadway, Ste. 305, Nashville, Tenn. 37203.
For more than a decade, more and more voices have been heard bemoaning the loss of U.S. lead- ership in high technology and calling for a govem- ment-led industrial policy to set things right. What such analysts fail to understand, contend econo- mists Nelson of Columbia and Wright of Stanford, is why the United States had its big technological...
David J. Armor, in The Public Interest (Summer 1992), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 530, Washington, D.C. 20036.
The bad news about the lives of many blacks living in America's cities is all too familiar: drugs, crime, joblessness, family breakdown, and, many ac- counts, failing public schools. Yet, in the face of these oft-reported woes, black students in America over the course of the 1970s and '80s posted sub- stantial gains in math and reading achievement, according to the National Assessment of...
David J. Armor, in The Public Interest (Summer 1992), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 530, Washington, D.C. 20036.
The bad news about the lives of many blacks living in America's cities is all too familiar: drugs, crime, joblessness, family breakdown, and, many ac- counts, failing public schools. Yet, in the face of these oft-reported woes, black students in America over the course of the 1970s and '80s posted sub- stantial gains in math and reading achievement, according to the National Assessment of...
birthright, manumission, or the purchase of their freedom. Of those, 3,775 blacks, living mostlv in the South, owned a total of 12,760 slaves. The vast majority of these masters had no more than a few slaves, but some in Louisiana and South Carolina owned as many as 70 or 80.
In most cases, Bumham says, the motive for ownership appears to have been benevolent. MosShepherd, for instance, manumitted by the ~irginia legislature for having provided infonna- tion about an insurrection in 1800, bought...
William A. Galston, in Raritai~(Winter 1993), Rutgers Univ., 31 Mine St., New Bmnswick, N.J. 08903.
John Dewey (1859-1952) is regarded some ad- mirers as America's uncrowned philosopher-king, the man who defined and popularized a civic reli- gion of democracy. In his long career, Dewey struggled to liberate philosophy from metaphysics, became the fountainhead of progressive thinking about education, and emphasized what he called "the religious meaning of democracy." But, con- tends Galston,...
William A. Galston, in Raritai~(Winter 1993), Rutgers Univ., 31 Mine St., New Bmnswick, N.J. 08903.
John Dewey (1859-1952) is regarded some ad- mirers as America's uncrowned philosopher-king, the man who defined and popularized a civic reli- gion of democracy. In his long career, Dewey struggled to liberate philosophy from metaphysics, became the fountainhead of progressive thinking about education, and emphasized what he called "the religious meaning of democracy." But, con- tends Galston,...
the beginning of the 20th century, however, the rise of a "con-sumer" society was accompanied a new emphasis on personality. According to the new ideal, Fox writes, "adulthood was open- ended, always still to be grown into, and ever subject to renegotiation."
According to Fox, it was not, as some historians have insisted, that personality displaced character, but that the two were merged. And the merger was carried out partly under the auspices of Protestant thinkers. Thus Henry...
Bev Littlewood and Lorenzo Strigini, in Scientific American (Nov. 1992), 415 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017-1111.
Occasional computer failure is a familiar fact of modem life. The usual result is inconvenience, a day's work lost or a rile destroyed. When comput- ers are used in critical applications, however, flaws in the software can spell disaster. During the Per- sian Gulf War, for example, the Patriot missile sys- tem failed to track an Iraqi Scud missile that killed 28 U.S. soldiers. The...
Lynn Abbott, in American Music (Faf1992), Univ. of LU. Press, 54 E. Gregory Dr., Champaign, 111. 61820.
Mention barbershop quartet, and a Gay Nineties im- age of dapper white barbers and- their patrons har- monizing together comes to mind. The impression that barbershopping is a white tradition was fos- tered for decades the Society for the Preserva- tion and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, founded in 1938 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Abbott, an independent scholar, strikes a dissonant...
Lynn Abbott, in American Music (Faf1992), Univ. of LU. Press, 54 E. Gregory Dr., Champaign, 111. 61820.
Mention barbershop quartet, and a Gay Nineties im- age of dapper white barbers and- their patrons har- monizing together comes to mind. The impression that barbershopping is a white tradition was fos- tered for decades the Society for the Preserva- tion and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, founded in 1938 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Abbott, an independent scholar, strikes a dissonant...
the early-20th-century avant- garde for having embraced aca- demicism. Picasso, however, took a different view of the older mas- ter. "Renoir's struggle during his last decades to bridge the gap be- tween his early work and the Western classical tradition with- out jettisoning his pioneering contributions to Impressionism," Fitzgerald writes, "provided a model for Picasso's own effort to broaden his art without turning his back on Cubism."
The strange pattern of Picas- so's...
1927-when movie producers reluctantly ap-proved a Hays associate's list of "Eleven Don'ts and Twenty-Six Be Carefuls" for filmmakers-re- formers were also supporting legislation to ban "block booking" and thus let local exhibitors refuse movies they found offensive. Independent exhibi- tors, struggling with large, studio-owned theater chains for survival, joined the reformers.
At that critical moment, Couvares writes, "a powerful ally appeared from the unlikeliest quar-...
diverting the Danube, has put the location of the border in question. There were 15 million
India's Tilt Toward the West
'India Copes with the Kremlin's Fall" 1. Mohan Malik, in Orbis (Winter 1993), Foreign Policy Research Inst., 3615 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa, 19104.
The demise of the Soviet Union, India's main ally in recent decades, has forced the Asian nation to turn toward the West. Not only is Moscow's exten- sive military, economic, and diplomatic support a thing of the past, b...
GDP per em-ployed person, France and Ger- many improve their relative standing. Even so, substantial dif-ferences in productivity remain.
To get a better picture of what is going on, the authors focus on the market economy (leaving out government, health, and educa- tion). This shows the United States still the leader in GDP per employed person, with Japan, surprisingly, pulling up the rear (with productivity in 1989 only 61 percent that of the United States). The explanation? While Japanese manufacturing...
Book Reviews
ARTIFICIAL LIFE: The Quest for a New Creation.
By Steven Levy. Pantheon. 390 pp. $25
COMPLEXITY: The Emerging Science at the
Edge of 'Order and Chaos. By M. Mitchell Waldrop.
Simon &Â Schuster. 380 pp. $23
COMPLEXITY: life at the Edge of Chaos. By
Roger Lewin. Macmillan. 208 pp. $22
KISSINGER: A Biography. By Walter Isaacson. Simon
& Schuster. 893 pp. $30
A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM, 1750-
1950: Volume 8; French, Italian, and Spanish Criticism,
1900-1950. By Ren.4 Wellek. Yale. 367 pp.
$42.50
By Kevin
Phillips. Random House. 307 pp. $23
By John Bulloch and
Harvey Morris. Oxford. 242 pp. $25
Jason Berry. 407 pp. Doubleday. $22,50
In the summer of 1983, in the heart of Louisiana's Cajun country, a nightmare became real when two parishioners of St. John's Catholic church learned that their trusted pastor, Father Gilbert Gauthe, had been sexually abusing their three sons, along with dozens of other St. John's alter boys. Horrible as the crime was, the response of the church hi- erarchy to its disclosure was nearly as appalling. Gauthe, it turns out, had been removed from a previous assignment...
By Kevin Coyne. Random House. 316 pp. $22
By Theda Skocpol. Harvard. 714 pp. $34.95
By Robert
S. Wistrich. Pantheon. 341 pp. $25
By Edward W.Said. Knopf. 380 pp. $25
By Charles Martin. Yale. 197 pp. $30
Ed. by Hershel Shanks. Random House. 336
pp. $23
immersion. Moreover, both the early Christians and the Es- senes expected the Messiah to appear imminently. One scroll, "The Messiah of Heaven and Earth," clearly alludes to the idea of bodily resurrection.
So much from the scrolls seems dear, but a number of questions they raise have no ready an- swers: Was John the Baptist a member of the com- munity that wrote the scrolls? Was Jesus, in fact, an Essene? Is the "Temple Scroll" the lost sixth book of the Torah? Taken together,...
By Joseph
Schwartz. HarperCollins. 252 pp. $25
. Helena Cronin. Cambridge. 490 pp. $39.95
Despite its imposing simplicity and awesome explanatory power, the theory of natural selection has never achieved the status of a universally ac- cepted scientific law. As recent surveys reveal, an astonishingly large proportion of people in the oth- erwise rational West do not believe in evolution. Belief, however, is not the only issue: The idea of design-without-a-designer has had to struggle for survival against not only those who dislike its im-plications...
Essays
If Weldon Kees were alive today, he would be 79 years old; but the first thing that makes this unthinkable is his poems. Their vehement bleakness makes it all too plausible that on July 19, 1955, when a car registered in his name was found near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the 41-year-old Weldon Kees had committed suicide.
ANNE THURSTON
Since the death of Mao Zedong in
1976, China's moribund communist
dynasty has been at least par-
tially revived. But as Deng
Xiaoping, architect of the restor-
ation, approaches his 89th year,
China finds itself on the brink of
a most uncertain future. Anne
Thurston, a veteran China-watcher
recently returned from the
People's Republic, looks at the
puzzles and contradictions of
the present for clues to where Asia's
greatest dragon may head.
communism ha...
ANNE THURSTON
Since the death of Mao Zedong in
1976, China's moribund communist
dynasty has been at least par-
tially revived. But as Deng
Xiaoping, architect of the restor-
ation, approaches his 89th year,
China finds itself on the brink of
a most uncertain future. Anne
Thurston, a veteran China-watcher
recently returned from the
People's Republic, looks at the
puzzles and contradictions of
the present for clues to where Asia's
greatest dragon may head.
communism ha...
The field of contemporary China studies has never been short on punditry, but recent years have witnessed an out-pouring of essays and books on the current Chinese condition. The Beijing massacre of 1989 alone produced over 30 books on the 50 days that shook the world. Most of the grow- ing Tiananmen bookshelf consists either of descriptive accounts by foreign eyewitnesses or of emotional autobiographies by Chinese dissidents now exiled abroad. The best analy- sis of the origins and events of...
PETE-R F. DRUCKER
Since ancient times, new knowledge and new
inventions have periodically remade human societies.
Today, however, knowledge is assuming greater importance
than ever before. Now more essential to the wealth of
nations than either capital or labor, Peter Drucker argues
here, it has already created a "postcapitalist" society
and promises further transformations on a global scale.
n only 150 years, between about 1750 and capitalism into Capitalism. Instead of...
OF THE
BY PETE-R F. DRUCKER
Since ancient times, new knowledge and new
inventions have periodically remade human societies.
Today, however, knowledge is assuming greater importance
than ever before. Now more essential to the wealth of
nations than either capital or labor, Peter Drucker argues
here, it has already created a "postcapitalist" society
and promises further transformations on a global scale.
n only 150 years, between about 1750 and capitalism into Capitalism. In...
Futurology tends to make scholars queasy. They generally prefer to leave the forecast- ing trade to science-fiction scribblers, free- lance prognosticators, and other untenured sorts. Social scientists somberly agree that their work must have "predictive value," but actual predic- tions, apart from economists' exercises in number crunching, are few. It is unique, then, to find some- body from the scholarly world who not only has tried his hand at prediction but is in a position to act:...
"If America is wrong, Jefferson is wrong," an early biographer wrote. "If America is right, Jefferson is right." This year, on his 250th birthday, it would appear that Jefferson was wrong. Many
historians of late have found the third U.S. president guilty of racism and other sins that besmirch the national character. Gordon Wood, by contrast, argues that Jefferson has never been an apt mirror of America. He was a representative figure of his day whose words haunt us because, unlike him, they transcend his own time.
irst of all I think it is desirable to put "curl up with a book." I despised them. I aside some time for reading-per- have never curled. My physique is not formed haps an evening, or an hour, or half for it. It is a matter of legend that Abraham an hour, or even 15 minutes, but a Lincoln read lying on his stomach in front of time in which to read and do nothing else and the fire; you should try that in order to under- pay no attention to anything but the book. stand the extraordinary...
concourses of today's airports on our way to catch a plane, how many of us pause to think that we are about to undertake an essentially aesthetic and moral experience? Yet only 60 years ago Western culture, high and low, celebrated aviation in just such terms. Hollywood's big studios glamourized the miracle of flight in a spate of star- studded films. Charles Lindbergh acquired the divine sobriquet "the new Christ." And the Modernist architect and aty planner Le Corbusier proclaimed...
sigmund Freud was well-established
but far from famous when he re-
ceived a letter in December 1908
from G. Stanley Hall, a noted Ameri-
can psychologist and the president of Clark
University, inviting him to give a series of in-
troductory lectures on psychoanalysis. The
52-year-old physician would be one of sev-
eral distinguished speakers at a ceremony
marking the 20th anniversary of the Worces-
ter, Massachusetts, institution. It was an excit-
ing opportunity for Freud, but he...
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? -W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"
round the world, rough beasts are busily slouching. They are the nations recently emerged from decades of com- munist misrule, or those on the verge
of similar emergence, while some additional few are escapees from other forms of authoritarian gov- ernance, both of the right and left persuasions. What all have in common, from Russia and Poland to Zambia and Nicaragua,...
