Spring 2025

In March 1962, in the eighth year of the Algerian War, the French government signed off on the Evian Accords, which established a ceasefire as well as a process that led to the July 5 proclamation in Algiers of independence—one …

How can one know whether China will or will not democratize? In general, as Karl Popper showed in The Poverty of Historicism, political futures in even the middle distance are unknowable because of the inherently uncertain and contingent dynamics of …

Any close analogy between “getting out” of Korea and American withdrawal from Vietnam, French withdrawal from Algeria, or British withdrawal from India necessarily fails, because in the sense implied by those cases, the United States has not gotten out of …

George Lichtheim is missing. You may not have noticed, especially if you don’t peruse political journals from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s (or didn’t read them back then). You may have noticed if the history of the left matters …

However much their methods differed, the British, Dutch, and French intended to cling to their colonies forever. But, from its start in 1898, the United States meant to limit its control of the Philippines—and, to that degree, the American-Filipino experience …

Preliminary Dialogue: The co-editor of Dissent argues with a philosophical friend to determine the truth (or a truth) of the matter. MW: The definite article is wrong. How could there be one good society, given the immense variety of human …

By the time this article sees print, our eyes will have blurred from reading that Barack Obama, the first African American to win the presidential nomination of a major party, has accomplished a feat that many Americans would not have …

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy by Peter Gay W.W. Norton, 2007, 640., pp $35.00 Peter Gay has had a remarkable career as a scholar. He has gone through many metamorphoses and left a great paper trail. Well into his eighties, …

Fifty-nine years after its Broadway debut, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s South Pacific is once again drawing applause. At this year’s Tony Award ceremony, it topped all musicals, winning seven awards. But the most serious praise for New York City’s …

Darfur’s ongoing agony continues to be attended by an obscene chorus of international mendacity, hypocrisy, and expediency. Not content simply to allow Khartoum’s génocidaires to accomplish their ghastly task, the African Union, the Arab League, the Non-Aligned Movement, key Security …

Throughout American history, politicians and public officials have exploited public anxieties about crime and disorder for political gain. The difference today is that these political strategies and public anxieties have come together in the perfect storm. They have radically transformed …

Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali Princeton University Press, 2007, 880 pp., $39.95 America, under George W. Bush, became a torturing country. Everyone knows it. One of Bush’s worst lies is this: “I’ve said to the people that we don’t …

For all their differences, the two leading presidential candidates have both spotlighted the promotion of human rights internationally as a cornerstone of a rebuilt American foreign policy. John McCain, breaking from Republican orthodoxy, has said that “promoting human rights abroad …

Kirill Medvedev is a new and very attractive figure on the Russian cultural landscape. A poet first, he published two books of confessional free verse early in this decade to much acclaim as well as controversy. Soon after, spurred in …