James B. Rule invites the left to think carefully about foreign policy, and in particular about the use of military force by the United States (“On Evils Abroad and America’s New World Order,” Dissent, Summer 1999). We should accept Rule’s …
Zig Zag: The Politics of Culture and Vice Versa by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg, et al. The New Press, 1998, 342 pp., $25 Here is a cherished anecdote told every now and then at Wesleyan University, …
How does the miraculous year 1989 look ten years later? We asked a number of friends to respond to some questions about the fall of communism and the standing, afterward, of the democratic left. The responses are a characteristically Dissentish …
My friend and colleague Ian Roxborough draws from a fund of expertise in military matters rare among our Dissent circle. He properly points out some unanswered questions in my exposition; let me try to return the compliment. Two kinds of …
The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964: The Beginning of the “Sixties” by Jon Margolis William Morrow & Company, 1999, 401 pp., $25 I have been thinking a lot, lately, about what it is history professors do, what journalists who …
In the post 1989 world, intellectuals and activists are suffering from an ongoing case of surprise. No one, for example—East or West—expected the wars that came seething out of Yugoslavia. With each day’s newspaper, pundits rush to reverse themselves. (“NATO …
Collective memory goes up for grabs wherever people suffer from dispossession and feel the call of pride. Memories are not born but made, remade, not natural but “constructed,” and like the memorials constructed to overcome memory, they are—and of necessity …
Bruce Ackerman and I are both passionate about opera; we both have egalitarian commitments. We both, I suppose, are “secular humanists.” We both would separate religion and state. And we diverge—markedly. Is it because Bruce Ackerman is a “liberal” and …
In the summer of 1989, when Slobodan Milosevic withdrew Kosovo’s political autonomy, I was across Yugoslavia on an achingly beautiful Dalmatian island, in search of a Herald Tribune. Let me explain. Ten years ago, a trip to the island of …
We on the left are in search of a new model for egalitarian society, after the definitive failure of what was called communism, and the evident victory, on an international scale, of capitalism. In my view, however, labeling that search …
I am struck by Mitchell Cohen’s embattled tone. It is as if we were locked in a life-and-death struggle with the Religious Right, which will settle for nothing less than the utter destruction of secular humanism. Liberals and social democrats …
I have suffered much anguish over NATO’s war in Yugoslavia. Unlike almost every U.S. military intervention of the past half century, this is a just war—but badly and irresponsibly led. It was cowardly of the White House to decide on …
The year 1999 will be second in significance only to 1989 in the history of postwar German politics. The transition from Bonn to Berlin as the country’s capital was completed this year, and the Euro was inaugurated during a German …
On March 16, the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews released a long-awaited statement, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” examining the Catholic Church and the Holocaust. Well, not exactly the the Catholic church, as Lenny Bruce …
Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism by Daniel Horowitz The University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, 352 pp., $29.95 In 1967, when I first became immersed in the women’s …
