Winter 2024

Even a president intent on redemocratizing our state will find it to be hard work. The growing power of the executive is a deeper problem than the combination of national security threats and abuses of power can explain. It is …

Scholarly writing explains British withdrawal from India in terms of a crisis of the colonial state precipitated by Britain’s expansive involvement in the Second World War and the sustained anticolonial struggle of Indians led by leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi …

This is the first issue of Dissent published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Penn Press will be taking over the entire business end of the magazine—production, circulation, subscription fulfillment, advertising, permissions, and promotion. The new cover by the Penn …

Another America spoke up this past fall. Barack Obama’s victory over the Reagan Revolution’s latest surrogates opens new possibilities. It is a moment for hope, but not for messianic expectations. “Lead us into the Promised Land,” someone cried out a …

Some years ago, when it became obvious that the labor movement was in trouble, when membership figures were dropping, academics came up with novel ideas to provide some measure of protection for unorganized workers. Only one suggestion was rooted in …

How does one recognize the looming inevitable? In the 1760s, the British, having defeated the French in America and expanded George III’s overseas empire, saw only profit and prestige ahead. A New England cleric, the Reverend Samuel Cooper, told his …

On David Rothkopf’s Superclass, Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, and Mark Engler’s How to Rule the World

The countries of Latin America remain highly susceptible to international political and economic trends. Since 2002, the region has prospered: growth has been close to 6 percent per year—the highest since the 1970s, and far above the lackluster, long-run average …

Turkey is unique among contemporary Muslim societies. Modern Turkey emerged as a nation-state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 and has been a republic since 1923. Discarding the theological trappings of …

In the fall of 2008, a little more than a year after the Bank for International Settlements (a Switzerland-based organization that fosters cooperation between central banks) warned that “years of loose monetary policy have fuelled a giant credit bubble, leaving …

“Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run,” the gambler says in a popular song. But in the aftermath of imperialism and war, walking away is not so simple. …

When he was named acting president of Russia on December 31, 1999, Vladimir Putin inherited a country still reeling from the Soviet Union’s breakup: economic woes caused by the rapid privatization of state assets and the August 1998 financial crisis, …

The publication in the October 6, 2008, New Yorker of a selection of the more than fifty thousand Norman Mailer letters that have been archived reminds us of what a vacuum he left when he died in November 2007 at …