Logically one should have expected that the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites would liberate ideas of democratic control of our economic destiny from the onus of association with the militarized despotism that the Soviets called …
Sometimes I worry that after I die I’ll find myself in an office, sitting across from a man who has a printout showing how I spent every minute of my life. He isn’t using the information to decide my fate. …
Holding opinions in a treacherous business for a woman. Shrill! Silly! Imprecations and accusations lurk at the edges of life and female psychology, fueling prejudices and women’s own self-censorship. Feminist writer Naomi Wolf recently called attention to how little women’s …
Revisionist scholarship on Freud has become a total assault on his achievement. If it were to succeed, virtually nothing would be left to value in his work. What would remain is a view of his legacy as a poison in …
At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I work, the person in charge of the maintenance of photocopiers is a middle-aged recent immigrant from Russia named Ya’kov. He arrived in Israel in 1990 and has been with us for some …
As we approach the millennial year 2000, there seems to be a general expectation that the twenty-first century will be the Pacific Century. After about two thousand years of European centered civilization as we know it (in philosophy, religion, and …
Republican ideologues are fighting a new cold war. Their enemy is the “corrosive liberal ethos” and the government that it supports. They believe that Ronald Reagan and George Bush failed, because government, or some semblance of it, still exists. This …
At the beginning of the year, the political news in the United States was totally dominated by the results of the November elections: the takeover of Congress by the Republicans and in particular the installation of Newt Gingrich as Speaker …
If this were a nineteenth-century book and not a modern magazine, the last few entries of a lengthy, cluttered index might appear right here, listing every conceivable and inconceivable topic along with the appropriate page number. We see very few …
Four weeks after the 1994 elections former liberal, former senator, and former presidential hopeful Paul Tsongas proclaimed the need for a third party and invited Colin Powell to be its standard bearer. The Boston Globe then ran a cartoon with …
It was widely expected that the Republicans would make significant gains in 1994. The Democrats were in disarray, suffering from powerful anticongressional sentiment and from too close an identification with their president, Bill Clinton, a man plagued by bad political …
It is called the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), and if enacted, it would end affirmative action in California. The state and its subdivisions would be prohibited from using race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin to discriminate against or …
Richard Rorty’s case for “prosecuting campaigns” (“Movements and Campaigns,” Dissent, Winter 1995) rather than “defining movements” rests on a carefully built construction of superimposed oppositions: tactics versus strategy; focusing on “what is to be done here and now” rather than …
In 1954, the year in which he founded Dissent, Irving Howe published an essay called “This Age of Conformity” in Partisan Review. Partisan Review was the organ of what has been dubbed (by T.J. Clarke) the “Trotskyite-Eliotic” culture of the …
Is sexual harassment understood differently by men and women? If so (as seems likely), whose understanding should set the standard for court decisions? These questions, which lawyers have argued about for almost a decade, reached the general public with the …
