For most of my politically conscious life,the idea of social transformation has been the great taboo of American politics. From the smug 1950s to the post-Reagan era, in which a bloodied and cowed left has come to regard a kinder, …
What happens when the idea of the worker disappears?
I AGREE WITH Jim Rule on the wrongness of Israeli settlement policy. I don’t believe, as he suggests, that ending American support for that policy would reduce hatred for the United States in the Arab and Muslim worlds. People who …
Editors: Alfred Kazin (“They Made It,” Dissent, Fall 1988) suggests that I find the legal execution of innocents “acceptable” in the implied sense of “unobjectionable, “wherefore I am despicable. This is an adscititious misinterpretation. In the context “acceptable” meant “predictable” …
WRITE a long, flowing political novel about a small group of Old Left, Anti-Stalinist socialists, tracing their paths from a youthful idealism in the late thirties to a weariness in the early sixties. Weave together their tangled personal lives and …
FEW SCHOLARS HAVE INFLUENCED our thinking about “extremism” as much as Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of social relations at Harvard. The first writer to apply the concept of a “radical Right” to American social movements (in 1951), he later proposed …
After the 1956 upheavals in the Communist world, and with the open outbreak of conflict between the Soviet and Chinese regimes, it became difficult to maintain the old belief that Communism was unvaried and unchanging. Yet, no matter how much …
ALL LITERATURE IS UTOPIAN in that fictive worlds are literally ou topos, i.e., no place. Implicitly or explicitly, literature is almost always a criticism of life because imagined reality is inevitably comparable to sensibly perceived reality. Actions can scarcely be …
“LOSS OF IDENTITY” and “quest for community”—these phrases, nearly worn out from overuse by pop-intellectuals, are rescued and restored to life by Richard Sennett in this thoughtful, seminal little book about the urban condition in America. “Condition” rather than “crisis,” …
ONE CAN APPROACH the phenomenon of fascism from various angles. The first analyses, mostly by Communist writers, explained it simply as the dictatorship of monopoly capital (a thesis that still lingers in Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, 1941, and Ignazio Silone’s School for Dictators, …
The Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu boasts a long, international-award-winning bibliography of poetry and prose. Yet in his fiction, he often speaks through narrators hostile to publication and recognition.
No play as important, as interesting as Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy has been shown for a very long time—and no play as interesting in an important way. I would insist, too, that the importance of the work is due not …
In the last few months, especially since the war in Vietnam and protests against it have both escalated, a number of commentators from many wings of opinion—right, center, and socialist—have expressed a great deal of doubt about and disapproval of …
