The Unperfect Society, by Milovan Djilas

"As the chapters that follow will illustrate, it is my belief that society cannot be perfect." Shall we laugh or cry? The latter, I assure you.

A Writer Between Generations

The present essay, in expanded form, constitutes the introduction to a collection of David Bazelon's essays, "Nothing But a Fine Tooth Comb."

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy: Personal Reflections on 1968, by Richard H. Rovere

RICHARD ROVERE can write; he can think; he's sensitive; he's DAVID T. BAZELON is the author of The Paper Economy and Power in America. been around. And here he makes a brief, strenuous effort to...

The Lawyers, by Martin Mayer

The New Class

Perhaps the profoundest event of this century in the United States has been the growth-to-dominance of corporations, which have become our chosen form for the social and political control of technology. The propertyless New Class is thus most broadly defined as that group of people who gain status and income through organizational position.

House Out of Order, by Richard Bolling

"House Out of Order" was written to stimulate opinion-makers to "inform the American people about the wretched condition of their national legislature."

Big Business & the Democrats

Let me suggest the following hypothesis: the political events of 1964 make possible, and all but insure, the belated completion of the New Deal.

The Real Voice, by Richard Harris

"The Real Voice" is a fascinating anecdotal narrative about eh whole process of administered pricing hearings in Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust by a very effective "New Yorker" writer with a good command of novelistic techniques.

Congress: The Sapless Branch, by Joseph S. Clark; and The Senate Establishment, by Joseph S. Clark & Others

The word "reform" should be understood as a slogan-much as we have witnessed the word "poverty" becoming a slogan in the past year or so and taking over the role "reform" once played.

The Great Treasury Raid, by Philip M. Stern; and The Cold War & the Income Tax: A Protest, by Edmund Wilson

We have here two very strenuous efforts at clarification of the federal system of taxation, written by two upper-class purists who have been horrified unto death by their discovery of certain of the qualities of American social reality.

Non-Rule in America

The first great issue in American history was whether we were to have a federal government at all; its final resolution took about a hundred years. The second great issue of American history--which remains unresolved after another hundred years--is whether the federal government, now that we have it, is ever going to be allowed to govern.

The National Wealth of the United States in the Postwar Period, by Raymond W. Goldsmith

Society and statistics grow together, the one in size and the other in importance. This is one of the larger meanings of living in a mass technological society.

The Warfare State, by Fred J. Cook

This fellow really believes the cold war was begun, and still continues, because of a conspiracy of the American military-industrial complex: such is the entire impression the reader will take away with him from this devious potpourri of a book.

The Politics of the Paper Economy

FROM THE early English colonial corporations through the period of railroad building and the growth of Standard Oil et al. to the present era of immense corporate enterprise,...

The Scarcity Makers

AMERICA'S MASSIVE and bountiful corporations are the institutional bedrock of the Paper Economy under which we live, yet their very existence was for many years neglected, if not denied,...

The Paper Economy

In time, immutable rules of conduct enforced under progressively changing conditions should logically result in a muddle. -Thorstein Veblen HERE ARE IMMENSE changes under way in our social...

My Life in Court, by Louis Nizer

NO MATTER HOW much the nine out of ten lawyers who never go to court may deny it, and no matter what legal entrancements they may find to occupy themselves meanwhile, the pure, true, and...

Portrait of a Business Generalist

SUCCESSFUL corporate lawyers like to be described these days as "generalists." This new term has a touch of magic for them-it seems to catch the essence of their drastically changed role in...

The Dream Life of the New Woman:
As Mirrored in Current “Historical” Heroines

The avowed purpose of our popular culture is to afford its avid consumers a quick momentary satisfaction of their fantasies

Dashiell Hammett's “Private Eye”:
No Loyalty Beyond the Job

The figure of the rough and tough private detective—or the “private eye,” as we have come to call him with our circulating library knowingness—is one of the key creations of American popular culture.

The American People, by Geoffrey Gorer

From Caligari to Hitler, by Siegfried Kracauer; and Magic and Myth of the Movies, by Parker Tyler

The Faith of Henry Wallace:
The Populist Tradition In The Atomic Age

Henry A. Wallace is the “uncommon man” whom many liberals propose as leader of the well-known Common Man, whose century is supposed to be the present one.

The Miracle of the Bells, by Russell Janney

Treasury for the Free World, edited by Ben Raeburn

It's a Secret, by Henry Hoke, and Time Bomb, by E. A. Piller