Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus Henry Holt and Company, 1997 286 pp $22.50 Time out of Mind by Bob Dylan Columbia Records, 1997 Anthology of American Folk Music Harry Smith, ed. Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings, 1997, re-issue 6 …
October 16, 1995, the largest public gathering of African Americans in history took place in Washington, D.C. The participants had come together under the slogan the Million Man March, with an agenda emphasizing racial pride, personal responsibility, and patriarchal family …
Shortly before writing this essay I received a questionnaire from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. It asked that I choose between the Democratic and Republican positions on nine “critical” issues: crime, the balanced budget, environmental protection, campaign-finance reform, education, religious …
“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 …
The real scandal in Washington is not Clinton’s sex life, but the government’s ability to pry into it. The real threat to the republic is not the lack of “character” in the Oval Office, but the erosion of privacy rights …
Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets by Robert Kuttner Knopf, 1997 410 pp $27.50M This is an immensely valuable book that has not gotten the attention it deserves. The reasons for its (relative) neglect have to do …
Not long ago I attended a conference on the theme, “Are serious books in serious trouble?” The question was rhetorical. One by one the suspects were arraigned on charges: publishing conglomerates, superstores, television, public education. By the end American culture …
Economic Justice by Stephen Nathanson Prentice Hall, 1998 144 pp $19.95 Everyone loves a good argument; and as we know from the dialogues of Plato, few questions are more likely to get an argument going than “What is justice?” In …
Jay mandle devotes most of his argument to setting up a straw man—the notion that those of us who have opposed Washington’s corporate-driven global economic policies are “protectionists,” ignorant of the textbook benefits of expanded trade, or else people with …
Horst brand faults me for failing to identify market ideology as a “coherent system of thought, embodying a politically legitimating purpose.” I don’t think that this charge withstands even a casual reading of my essay, which inveighs at length against …
The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism by Michael Lerner Addison-Wesley, 1996 338 pp $24, $13 paper Those of us who are trying to rethink left politics cannot avoid coming to terms with Michael …
In his article “Markets and Social Pain” (Dissent, Winter 1998), James B. Rule argues that market ideology “poses a historic challenge to the kind of thinking we do in Dissent.” He observes that no question is currently more important for …
There’s something odd about living in a city of three million (and not having it be New York). What’s odd is this: live theater. Chicago has pages of it. Maybe a third as much as New York’s, often at a …
HONG KONG’S “transition” seems to have faded from the international headlines. Contrary to the expectations of doom and gloom, the handover to China, or the “takeover,” as the New York Times put it on July 1, did not have a …
Some of us Dissenters agitated year after year for a design overhaul and a new logo for the magazine. So I had high hopes when the revolution began last January, that is, when Michael Walzer, Mitchell Cohen, the staff, and …
