Marc’s most lasting contribution to the cause of American progressivism came in 1963, when he co-founded, with his fellow activist-thinker Barnet, the Institute for Policy Studies, which became the left’s leading think tank. In a 1993 piece, he invoked the gap between thought and action: “Are there existential commitments that liberal-minded philosophers are prepared to make that match their ideas with their own political actions? Sartre complained that no professor of ethics he had ever heard of had taken so much as a bop on the head for the wretched.” We are in need of reconstruction and institutional transformation.” Years earlier, Marc made his own contribution to such a rethinking by drawing up a guide to what a progressive program should be: “Everyone is entitled to work individual accumulation is secondary to the development of the common heritage and common wealth citizenship must now extend to the workplace we must reconsider and transform our defense policies and international purposes so as to achieve a truly secure society at home.”
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We are in need of something more than co-optable reforms, something less open to distortion and more life-affirming than revolution. Where we are in need of rethinking, let us rethink, and where we have been right, morally and politically, let us say so forcefully. “Where we have been wrong we must so state.
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“It is time for a wide-ranging dialogue on the left and liberal side of the spectrum,” Raskin wrote in a preface to his essay. Singham, who had been a fellow Nation editorial-board member, inspired a 1991 Nation symposium on the left’s need to take a hard look at its own shortcomings amid the collapse of the Soviet Union.