The famous American liberalism/communitarianism debate, which is now being reproduced (at least among academic political theorists) in many parts of the world, is far less important for real politics than the recognition of two competing kinds of communitarianism, one focused …
The most remarkable thing about South African politics is how unremarkable they have become. I say this as someone born and raised there, who left in the early 1970s at the age of fifteen. On returning for a year’s sabbatical …
Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents by Paul Theroux Houghton Mifflin, 1998, 368 pp., $24 Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer by Norman Podhoretz The Free Press, …
Steve Fraser’s article renders me virtually (but not totally) speechless. He doesn’t claim, directly, that democracy, as a general system of governance, is bad for unions. Had he done so, it might be easier to have a clear discussion. Although …
This issue marks forty-five years of Dissent. It is easy to imagine that our founders would have been a bit surprised if told back in 1954 that this magazine would still be a vigorous venture at the century’s close. After …
I am an immigrant to Dissent-land from the shores of the New Left. Although I’ve had my naturalization papers since 1986, my nontraditional background got me this Last Page assignment. For the magazine’s forty-fifth anniversary, the editors asked me to …
Distinctions between public and private have been central to feminist analysis. Distinctions between civil society and the state are far less frequently invoked. Does feminism need a concept of civil society? It certainly does not need what is presented in …
What has struck many observers by now is the failure of the ordinary system of legal checks to assist the country in a time of constitutional crisis. The failure has several dimensions: the arrogance of the courts, which stripped a …
Stanley Aronowitz Herman Benson, and Gordon Haskell adopt an essentially similar approach in disapproving of my article on union democracy. It’s an old, if not particularly venerable one, which runs as follows: “If you don’t like the message, shoot the …
The revolution is over. While November’s election may have been a knock in the head to the Republican Party generally, it was a dagger through the heart of the Republican right. As moderate GOP governors swept to victory all across …
