Bureaucracy and Liberty

I spent my last term as a college undergraduate in the spring of 1969. For many of my classmates, that was above all the time of the occupation of University Hall, a student strike, the end, for decades, of ROTC programs on the Harvard campus, and the creation of a black studies department. I watched all t hose events as an observer, because I had just handed in my senior these on George Orwell--which anyone can read here--and the SDS reminded me much too much of the communists he had encountered in Spain and in the British intellectual community to persuade of much of anything. And at the same time, I was taking the second half of Stanley Hoffmann's course on modern France. I wrote another big paper for that one, on the split between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Then, during that great Harvard institution Reading Period--eliminated by Larry Summers to put Harvard's fall exams before Christmas, as they were at its major competitors--I read The Old Regime and the French…