After Francois Mitterrand was elected president of France in May 1981, and the legislative elections of June 1981 gave the Socialist party a solid majority in the National Assembly, a sense of euphoria spread through the French left, both inside …
Suppose the Golem had been made, not of the clay that legend has it, but of plastic: what would have been his fate? Well, he might have been elected president and as he acquiesced in the engineering of a depression …
The Automobile Workers Union (UAW) will be holding its convention this May in Dallas; we expect to have a report in our next issue. Meanwhile, we print below excerpts from a conversation recently held in Washington, D.C., between Irving Howe …
In the Paris office of the Coordinating Committee of Solidarnok, Jacek xeroxes pages of the underground press recently smuggled into France. “We are a clearing house for most of the information coming out of Poland,” he says. Holding up a …
In the U.S.S.R. the death of the leader of the party and state is a political event of extraordinary significance, usually marking the end of an era. Protracted tenure in office permits Soviet leaders to conclude a fair number of …
Stung by its defeat in 1980, disgraced by its attempt to out-budget-cut the Republicans in 1981, the Democratic party is united in 1982 mainly in its opposition to Reagan. But beneath this tenuous unity there is ideological unease and organizational …
Protest against oppressive regimes can take a dramatic form: demonstrations, work stoppages, hunger strikes, even self-immolation. But a softly-spoken, “No, I will not,” can also constitute an act of dissent. In Jiri Grusa’s case, such a refusal provides the foundation …
Hannah Arendt was once approached by her student Elisabeth Young-Bruehl with a translation Young-Bruehl had done of a phrase by Aristotle. After due consideration of its Latin and German renderings, Arendt remarked, “Ja, well, my dear, it’s not exactly right, …
That the Catholic Church in Latin America has undergone a political reorientation in recent years is widely known. But until now there have been almost no detailed studies of how and why this happened. The first conclusion that emerges from …
Habent sua fata libelli—”books have their own fates.” It will be interesting to know what the fate of Milan Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, will be in the United States, now that it has at last been published in English …
Benvenisti stresses [that] it’s not so much the number of settlements as the type of settlement that is the most significant factor. During the period of the Labor government the concept of settlement dictated the building of kibbutzim and moshavim, …
Two choices will predominate in America over the next decade—one economic and one political. The economic choice is between preserving an industrial base that is growing increasingly uncompetitive in the global economy, or pushing that industrial base into higher-valued and …
I have subscribed to Dissent for many years—since 1960, I believe—and know I have helped the magazine gain a wider exposure. I convinced a librarian at the University of Western Ontario to establish a subscription, and to order all available …
The United States, as Louis Hartz argues in The Liberal Tradition in America, may have been born liberal, and it may have grown up over two centuries confined within an unselfconscious Lockean consensus about an “American way of life” based …
From field notes on city life: A woman is seriously injured by a mugger who follows her to an apartment door and snatches her purse. A couple out for an evening returns to find the apartment burglarized. A 13-year-old car, …
