Spring 2025

I had the pleasure to be a foreign expert at Hebei University in 1984. The opportunity to live in Baoding, to get to know a city I had never even heard of, and to meet Chinese teachers and students was …

Jesse Jackson as a leading left-of-center political force is again receiving a lot of attention. There are numerous concerns about Jackson: Does he have a legitimate function in black American politics? A legitimate function in American politics? Given his deployment …

It was expected that General Motors would announce plant closings. But when the announcement came last November, the scale was astounding: 29,000 workers in 11 plants laid off. Almost two thirds of the affected unionized workers (17,450) live in Michigan. …

Philosophers of social science have identified description, explanation, and evaluation as three distinct ways of assessing any historical phenomenon. If this triad is applied to Ellen Schrecker’s study of McCarthyism and American higher education, she earns high if not quite …

From the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, a consensus held in American society presided over by the Liberal Establishment. Generally speaking, that consensus comprised an internationalist orientation; a belief in New Deal social policies and Keynesian economics; and in culture, a …

Peru is a country that has undergone dramatic changes in the last twenty years, and some of these have taken a sad toll on both social and political institutions. Basically, the country was not prepared for such changes, and as …

In the Winter 1987 Dissent Roy Medvedev singled out the Soviet theater as the artistic medium most quickly responsive to cultural changes. After describing some of the politically daring plays on Moscow’s stages, Medvedev added an appropriate caveat about the …

It’s almost as though an “iron law” operates in all the communist countries, varied though they are. They seem haunted by the specter of democracy, especially when they seek to reform their moribund economies. Their economic growth and individual well-being …

Spring brings out robins, crocuses, and the homeless. On a May afternoon I was sitting on the bank of the Charles River in Boston, angling for the first tentative pleasures of sun and birds, when I noticed a large man …

Readers of the New York Times discovered last fall that Irving Kristol is not only an important philosopher, economist, political scientist, and historian, but a biologist, too. In an op–ed piece titled “Room for Darwin and the Bible,” Kristol criticized …

It is a characteristic of ideological groups—on the right as well as on the left—that they feel justified in taking “positions” on everything. In this as in other respects, the neoconservative intellectuals follow in the footsteps of an earlier generation …

If zeal is the essential ingredient of the crusader, I’ll never be one of the best. My primal juices flow intermittently, with long quiescent periods during which the world stumbles along without benefit of my counsel. I am, in short, …

Over the past twenty-two months, almost since the day of President Reagan’s second inauguration, the foreign policy of the United States has been controlled by a handful of military officers and their pals: freelance spies, itinerant jobbers from think tanks, …

In April 1940 the Paris-based Russian Menshevik journal, Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (SV), published an article by the famous Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding entitled “State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy?” Hilferding argued that the Soviet Union should be understood as the harbinger …

Occasionally, a book is published or a film released that leads one to realize that the old verities no longer hold. Heimat is such a work. A fifteen-and-one-half-hour film written and directed by Edgar Reitz for German television, Heimat (which …