The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, 496 pp., $29.95 Rescuing Justice and Equality by G.A. Cohen Harvard University Press, 2008, 448pp., $47.50 Contemporary political philosophy starts from John Rawls’s theory of justice. …
Sometimes the essence of a societal moment is well captured by an individual artist. Such is the case for German photographer Andreas Gursky, whose work—displayed this spring in his first retrospective (1984-2000) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—captures …
How should democratic socialists think about the family and its role in modern society? The essential problem is to find alternatives to individualist and marketized conceptions of social life. Solutions to this problem are most commonly sought in the political …
As i was reading the advance proofs of David Miller’s article, the World Cup was being transmitted from France and shown on British television, to huge popular interest. This spectacle offered the choice of two different kinds of national identification. …
There is good reason to fear that “postmodern” and “postindustrial” currents of thought will sweep away the foundations of existing radical critiques without offering anything very substantial in their place. It is all very well to criticize social democracy, the …
About ten years ago during a stay in the United States I was lucky enough to be invited to attend one or two meetings of the Dissent editorial board held (as I recall) in the living room of Simone Plastrik’s …
Recent events in Britain offer little cheer for anyone committed to democratic socialism. After what was widely held to be Labour’s most effective election campaign in twenty years, Labour gained a share of the vote that was only 3.5 percent …
Michael Walzer’s “Notes on Public Space” is a valuable reopening of a debate that in the past has been very important to radical thought. I will here suggest that qualitative and aesthetic issues like this one may have an exemplary …
In the general election that took place in the spring of 1988, Mrs. Thatcher was eventually defeated. The dominant issue was unemployment, as it had been for two or three years prior to the election, since the end of the …
For a period of ten years, since the collapse of the “power-sharing” Executive under the impact of the Ulster Workers’ Strike of 1974, the problems of Northern Ireland have seemed virtually insoluble. Political opinion in the two communities in the North …
One would have thought that the Thatcher government would provoke a much needed renewal of the Labour party. Thatcherism has involved an explicit repudiation of the whole framework of postwar consensus politics, and has defined the policies of both the …
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