Spring 2025

In the wake of the Tet offensive, on March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, initiated peace talks with Hanoi, and declared he would not run for a second term. In …

On Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age

The U.S. Supreme Court reacted slowly to the constitutional questions raised by post–September 11, 2001, anti-terror strategies. Many questions of constitutional law are still unanswered. There have been no rulings on the “special treatment” of detainees in the fight against …

At 1:27 a.m. on the morning of August 4, 2005, Herbert Manes stabbed Robert Monroe—known as “Shorty”—to death on the 1400 block of West Oakland Street in North Philadelphia. No newspaper reported the incident. Arrested and charged with homicide, Manes …

In March 1962, in the eighth year of the Algerian War, the French government signed off on the Evian Accords, which established a ceasefire as well as a process that led to the July 5 proclamation in Algiers of independence—one …

How can one know whether China will or will not democratize? In general, as Karl Popper showed in The Poverty of Historicism, political futures in even the middle distance are unknowable because of the inherently uncertain and contingent dynamics of …

Any close analogy between “getting out” of Korea and American withdrawal from Vietnam, French withdrawal from Algeria, or British withdrawal from India necessarily fails, because in the sense implied by those cases, the United States has not gotten out of …

George Lichtheim is missing. You may not have noticed, especially if you don’t peruse political journals from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s (or didn’t read them back then). You may have noticed if the history of the left matters …

However much their methods differed, the British, Dutch, and French intended to cling to their colonies forever. But, from its start in 1898, the United States meant to limit its control of the Philippines—and, to that degree, the American-Filipino experience …

Preliminary Dialogue: The co-editor of Dissent argues with a philosophical friend to determine the truth (or a truth) of the matter. MW: The definite article is wrong. How could there be one good society, given the immense variety of human …

By the time this article sees print, our eyes will have blurred from reading that Barack Obama, the first African American to win the presidential nomination of a major party, has accomplished a feat that many Americans would not have …

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy by Peter Gay W.W. Norton, 2007, 640., pp $35.00 Peter Gay has had a remarkable career as a scholar. He has gone through many metamorphoses and left a great paper trail. Well into his eighties, …

Fifty-nine years after its Broadway debut, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s South Pacific is once again drawing applause. At this year’s Tony Award ceremony, it topped all musicals, winning seven awards. But the most serious praise for New York City’s …