Allen Graubard notes my claim that the alliance between so-called progressive school reformers and conservative critics who dominate our public education debates serves only the latter’s purposes. As the growing strength of voucher plans and for-profit contractors (such as Chris …
When historians of ideas go to work on the last decade of the twentieth century, the market will surely appear as one of our intellectual totems. What the Rights of Man were to the French Revolution—or what Manifest Destiny or …
One hundred fifty years after its publication, and almost a decade after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, can something still be learned from The Communist Manifesto? The Manifesto is perhaps the most unabashedly rhetorical and flamboyant of Marx …
Mitchell Cohen’s essay “Why I’m Still ‘Left’ ” (Dissent, Spring 1997) presents a strong argument for the continuing relevance of a “left” political identity. Cohen addresses the widespread sense that “left” politics has become outmoded, a sense given powerful expression …
Underworld by Don DeLillo Scribner, 1997 827 pp $27.50 Underworld has the makings of a masterpiece. It’s a novel of the historical imagination on a vast scale, with uncompromising perceptual rigor. On the level of the sentence, it pulls off …
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century by Michael Denning Verso, 1996 556 pp $25, cloth; $20, paper In 1950, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) published Yertle the Turtle. A brief summary of this illustrated story …
Many readers of Dissent may associate mass demonstrations in Washington with liberal or radical gatherings such as the 1963 civil rights march or later protests against U.S. intervention in Indochina and Central America. But political and cultural conservatives have an …
Why should college and university professors have job security, when so many other Americans are losing theirs? From U.S. News & World Report to the Los Angeles Times to the Washington Post, powerful voices are asking that question, and answering …
In a recent essay in Dissent (“The Real Costs of Education,” Spring 1996), Richard Rothstein provided an illuminating critique of the contention by many critics of the public schools that budgets have steadily risen over the past three decades while …
I am sorry that Richard Rothstein has chosen not to respond to my main points: that the public school system continues its “tracking” functions; that public high schools are typically authoritarian and alienating; that the vision of progressive education has …
Dissent begins the new year—and moves toward the new millennium—with a new look. It is our second “make-over” in forty-four years. We think it is fresh and attractive, and we hope our readers agree. In Dissent’s first issue, its founders …
The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., And the Fate of America’s Big Cities by Fred Siegel Free Press, 1997 260 pp $24 At several points in reading this book, I had the curious feeling that Fred Siegel …
This fall President Clinton made “fast-track” negotiating authority—whereby Congress must vote yes or no on trade agreements presented by the president, with no amendments allowed—his top legislative priority. The prospects for passage looked good. Every major newspaper supported it; the …
The traveler’s great temptation is to fix a place with a phrase and then be done with it. Sometimes, despite all the possibilities for error, a phrase does work: Florence lives in its stones, as Mary McCarthy saw; Paris remains …
I want to talk as a philosopher today—a practical and engaged philosopher. I won’t argue for particular policies, but I also won’t remain at the level of abstract principles. If philosophy is to engage with politics, it had better be …
