I In a lecture at Harvard during my freshman year, a professor—who may have been Martin Peretz—offered an insight that left a profound impact upon me. “Citizen,” the professor noted, was a unique and quite revolutionary concept. Different from many other terms, e.g., “comrade,” the notion of citizen implied a specific relationship between an individual and the polity. It specifically …
Yearning for the Past: Is Human Society Regressing?
“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away Now it looks as though they’re here to stay Oh, I believe in yesterday”—The Beatles 1965 In the 1970s, I had a staunch conservative colleague, a political science professor, who was the only professor I ever met who openly used his classroom as a bully pulpit for his political views. Once, in …