Author: Myron Magnet

02/22/98
Boston Globe

Conservatives plant a seed in NYC

ANOTHER SIGN of how much New York has changed: The most influential source of political ideas is a conservative think tank that was founded by Margaret Thatcher’s mentor and Ronald Reagan’s spymaster.

The Manhattan Institute was a speck on the margins of the city’s political landscape when it opened in 1978, promoting the un-New Yorkerish notions of free-market economics, conservative values and the dismantling of the welfare state. Now, 20 years later, it dominates political discussions and helps set the agenda. Continue reading →

02/28/93

The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass

The Dream and the Nightmare by Myron Magnet
Myron Magnet’s The Dream and the Nightmare argues that the radical transformation of American culture that took place in the 1960s brought today’s underclass — overwhelmingly urban, dismayingly minority — into existence. Lifestyle experimentation among the white middle class produced often catastrophic changes in attitudes toward marriage and parenting, the work ethic and dependency in those at the bottom of the social ladder, and closed down their exits to the middle class. Continue reading →

11/23/87
FORTUNE Magazine

The Homeless

DEEPLY DISTURBED AND ENSHROUDED BY MYTH, many are victims of alcohol, family breakdown — and well-intentioned social policies gone awry. Most need more than housing to solve their problems. Continue reading →

07/6/87
FORTUNE Magazine

The Money Society

HOW MUCH DOES HE MAKE? How big was the deal? What did they pay for their house … their boat … their painting? Money seems to be the only thing that counts these days. Here’s why. Continue reading →

05/31/85

Dickens and the Social Order

"One of the most stimulating studies of Dickens to have appeared in recent years." — New York Times
“One of the most stimulating studies of Dickens to have appeared in recent years.” — New York Times

Myron Magnet’s groundbreaking study of Charles Dickens’s early novels shows that the liberal reformism for which Dickens is so well known rested on a surprisingly traditional view of society.

Magnet writes, “The four great but relatively neglected works I discuss in Dickens and the Social Order … add up to what for another writer would constitute a magnificent life’s work in itself, a tour de force that is like a university education in psychology, political theory, comparative political science, cultural anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, and more — all transfigured and illuminated by the genius of the writer rightly said to be Inimitable, so that the reader can hardly believe that anything so full of pleasure can also be so full of wisdom.” Continue reading →