The New Republic Reader: Eighty Years of Opinion and Debate.

• Author: Feeney, Mark

George Orwell made no secret of his frequent irritation with the New Statesman--which in fact didn't keep him from declaring his even greater irritation over the occasional Saturday when it failed to arrive in his mailbox. Not a few of us feel the same way about The New Republic. It is maddening, wayward, obstreperous...and more or less indispensable. With its commitment to the world of ideas as well as the realm of public policy, TNR holds a unique place in our national discourse. For all that readers may lament the magazine's often snarky tone and two-decade-long creep rightward, they have no other recourse if they want a generally liberal weekly journal of opinion. (The Nation? Like National Review, it is ultimately about ideology, not politics. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or, for that matter, a good thing. But it is a different thing.)

This is the fourth anthology of selections from the magazine, the others having appeared on the 20th, 50th, and 60th anniversaries of its founding 80 years ago this November. The magazine began in 1914 as a beacon of Progressivism, a last monument of the Age of Reform. The twenties and thirties saw its growing radicalization--or quasi-radicalization. With the coming of the Depression, TNR seemed to falter. It was at once too conservative for those increasingly Marxist times yet too fellow-traveling to serve as a true liberal alternative. Even more problematic was the magazine's opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II--surely a consequence, at least in part, of its ardent support of entry into World War I. Having Henry Wallace as editor for a brief period after the war only made things worse. More significant, the emergence of Partisan Review during the forties, the newfound seriousness of The New Yorker under William Shawn during the fifties, and the arrival of The New York Review of Books in the sixties meant the back of the book came to suffer eclipse as the front had.

There were two key dates in shaping TNR as we today know it: 1950, when it moved from New York to Washington; and 1974, when Martin Peretz bought the magazine. The move emphasized the magazine's orientation toward politics and its sense of newsiness, attributes that would distinguish TNR as other "serious" publications found themselves increasingly subject to the academicization of intellectual life in postwar America. Yet at the same time, the arrival of Peretz--besides bringing in fresh blood and new money--helped bolster...