Stanley Hoffmann’s title “What Should U.S. Foreign Policy Be?” confines him to writing a prescriptive piece and far be it from me to fault an author for not doing what he didn’t set out to do. Still, I found myself …
Editors: It is true, as Dennis Wrong wrote (“PR on PC” Spring 1994) that political correctness has been widely discredited and often ridiculed (though it is significant that this happens far more often outside than inside academia). However, the fact …
Heterodoxy is a newish (since 1992) tabloid-sized monthly with an announced narrowness of focus: PC on campus. Its pages, festooned with exploding firecrackers and other crude line drawings, are full of virulent attacks on what it alternately sees as a …
This White House seems to have no foreign policy vision and no interest in developing one. This is a bad political mistake—even for an administration that would prefer to focus “like a laser beam” on domestic problems. It is the …
The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the cold war have changed the face of international politics. What should American foreign policy be in these new circumstances? Dissent asked Harvard’s Stanley Hoffmann to outline an answer to …
The dynamism of Marxism, the flowing sixties atmosphere, and the general tendency of feminist utopians to dream of amniotic bliss—all meet in The Dialectic of Sex. When one remembers that the feminist bookshelf wasn’t a foot long in 1970, the fullness, clarity and force of Shulamith Firestone’s feminism is simply amazing.
On the corner of 17th and Broadway, in an African-American section of Indianapolis, there is a vacant space comprising two unused lots, sections of two parking lots, and the edge of a small park. On the evening of April 4, …
About a week before Arafat, I visited Jericho to see how “the autonomy” (as my Israeli friends call it) was faring. It was, that week, faring well. The city, bedecked in Palestinian flags, was quiet; the old police and new …
From time immemorial the prime agency of individual and social reproduction has been inertia, the biological form of which is instinct and the cultural form, tradition. That is to say, things were done because they had been done before— an …
Alas, the editors of Social Text have discovered that my article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which appeared in Social Text #46/47, is a parody. In view of the important intellectual and political issues raised …
The dominant wisdom about the Holocaust is that its enormity surpasses comprehension. Having shattered traditional faith (how could God have permitted it to happen?), the Holocaust has acquired the sanctity of deity and become the object of a kind of …
Characteristically, Stanley Hoffmann assesses the challenges facing American foreign policy with the touch of a master: broad brush strokes set on an enormous canvas, with impressive attention to nuance. The stance adopted is neither critical nor apologetic, but rather magisterial: …
Few Americans, of whatever political persuasion, would disagree with David Plotke’s four “good things that health care reform should try to do.” My own list of the aims of health financing reform (as distinguished from delivery system reform) includes those …
I have no particular quarrel with Stanley Hoffmann’s comments, not even with the one endorsing a “free enterprise system” in Russia. But since Dissent is a journal of the left, allow me to exhume an additional point from the ancient …
“Nobody reads Dissent but a bunch of old lefties.” So said one of our friends in the course of discussions about the magazine’s future after Irving Howe’s death last year. The remark was meant as a provocation, and so the …
