Spring 2025

Joanne Barkan asks whether globalization is turning Europe into a museum

The War in Iraq and Dissent

If poetry, as Wordsworth wrote, “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,” political thought should take its origin from contention and anger similarly recollected. I suspect that tranquility is in short supply among our writers, but still, we try …

If only working-class and poor people would register and vote, liberal Democrats would win every election-that’s what we thought, until November 2, 2004. Democrats work on voter registration, Republicans work on vote suppression. So tens of millions were spent on …

In the fall of 2002, the American Political Science Association appointed a Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy. The fifteen members of the task force are Lawrence Jacobs, chair (University of Minnesota), Ben Barber (University of Maryland), Larry Bartels …

Roméo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil and Keir Pearson and Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda

The Dirty Little Secret of Financial Globalization

Nicholaus Mills looks at the first battle for Social Security

“[P]assions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves …

Too Much Logic, Too Little Evidence

Harold Hongju Koh tells the Senate about legal responsibility and torture

My political radicalism was a by-product of growing up in South Africa—of the liberalism of my mother and the communist leanings of my father. South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s was a strange and terrible place. Young white people …

“Whatever Dissent‘s problems,” Irving Howe once said to me in the 1980s, “we at least have two of the most literate economists alive.” He was referring to Robert Lekachman and Robert Heilbroner. Bob Heilbroner was a man of prodigious energy. …

There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary American environmentalism. On the one hand, its organizations are generally larger, stronger, better funded, and more knowledgeable than ever before. Membership has grown in recent years; there are now more than …