Winter 2024

“Communitarianism” entered the language only within the last twenty years. You will not find it in the 1975 edition of Webster’s dictionary, though you will find a “communitarian” there defined as “a member of a society that practices communism.” What …

E.M. Forster introduces his Aspects of the Novel by proposing that “we are to visualize the English novelists. . . as seated together in a room, a circular room. . . all writing their novels simultaneously.” Likewise, Joseph Schwartz summons …

We live in an ever-widening circle of genocides, achieved and attempted, perpetrated in the present and discovered in the past. But we see and care about few of them. Such selective perception is, I believe, encouraged by the often-repeated claim …

Richard Rorty’s case for “prosecuting campaigns” (“Movements and Campaigns,” Dissent, Winter 1995) rather than “defining movements” rests on a carefully built construction of superimposed oppositions: tactics versus strategy; focusing on “what is to be done here and now” rather than …

I propose here to discuss the topic of human rights as seen from the standpoint of five doctrines or outlooks that are dominant in our time. I don’t propose to be fair to these outlooks. Rather, I shall treat them …

Once I had met Irving, I never visited New York without calling on him. Unfortunately, I respected him to excess. Foolishly, I never stayed very long, not wanting to tie up his valuable time. I now nurse the futile belief …

In 1932 R. H. Tawney published an article in which he reflected upon the events of the previous year: the collapse of the Labour government and the massive electoral defeat of the Labour party in which it lost 235 seats, …