I doubt there is a “should” here anywhere. How one responds to the first query will turn, in part, on whom one places within the category “American intellectuals.” For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that those who make …
Editor’s Note: This lecture was delivered at a conference entitled ‘Sidney Hook and American Democracy: Current Crises, Future Challenges,’ on October 1, 2005. It is reproduced with the kind permission of Jean Bethke Elshtain and Social Democrats USA.
Exit or No Exit?
Let me get a gripe out of the way before I begin to review seriously this work by a distinguished contemporary philosopher. Notice the sub-title: an ‘interrogation.’ Is anyone out there as tired as I am of this term? It …
Whether in agreement or demurral, one reads Michael Walzer with interest and respect. His work is a welcome contrast to the vicious rhetoric of accusation and denunciation that is so much a part of our public life. The basics of …
Mr. Ivie, a Professor of Communications at Indiana University, here draws together a collection of essays united by several themes: the United States is a ‘distempered democracy,’ plagued by ‘demophobia,’ indeed nothing less than a ‘republic of fear.’ (Here, of …
Marjorie Heins has written an intelligent but predictable polemic in favor of “free expression” for those she variously calls “youngsters,” (this excludes “little ones” though how little we are not told), “older minors” and, of course, “teenagers” though her argument …
In his classic Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville claimed, “Language is perhaps the strongest and most enduring link which unites men. All the immigrants spoke the same language and were children of the same people.” These common points of …
In 1989 a young scholar named Jeff Smith published a book entitled Unthinking the Unthinkable: Nuclear Weapons and Western Culture, a book that received too little attention at the time or subsequently, for that matter. Dissatisfied with economic and psychological analyses …
What I found most surprising in Iris Young’s analysis (“Making Single Motherhood Normal,” Winter 1994) is the radical disconnection between her policy proposals and the constraints and possibilities of our current situation. She calls for “massive increases in state support …
No small projects for Orlando Patterson. Freedom is grand in scope, heartfelt, and refreshingly old fashioned. By that I mean Patterson offers a “grand narrative” of the sort now under sustained attack in many quarters, and the very fact that …
The politics of the battered women’s movement brings together a number of vital concerns: the role of the state in intimate relations, feminist analyses of male violence and power, and the ways political activists and professional “social service providers” variously …
must write a piece on feminism, family, and community. I write as someone who has been involved in the politics of the feminist movement since the early 1960s, someone who characterizes her own work as made possible in part by …
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