Editor’s Page

It is perhaps a sign of living uneasily in the here and now that we spend so much time looking backward and forward. We find our way in the difficult present by focusing on the past and the future. So, in this issue, Gerda Lerner reflects on the 150th anniversary of the Seneca Falls conference, the founding moment of American feminism, and provides an account of what has been achieved, and what hasn’t, in the years since. Anson Rabinbach describes the fights going on among French intellectuals over how to think about the communist past. Sven Birkerts remembers his own adolescence, growing up in the sixties, when everyone’s personal life had an immediately available political translation. David Lehman writes about the apolitical stance of the “last” avant-garde—the New York poets of the 1950s and 1960s. n We are turned to the future, too, even if, in this post-utopian age, we tend to write skeptically about great-days-to-come. But Seyla Benhabib and Michael Rustin, responding to David Miller’s Euro-skepticism, are enthusiastic or, at least, hopeful about the emerging European Union. And Robin Blackburn suggests that there will be opportunities for an ambitious left politics in the years just ahead—but will democratic left parties have the courage to seize them? In a deliberately more modest vein, Jeffrey Isaac describes the international campaign against land mines as a harbinger of politics to come—a “new social movement,” specifically focused, nonideol...