Spring 2025

Ten years ago I taught English to the children of subsistence farmers in Togo, a tiny country on the west coast of Africa that I once thought I knew. But when I went back recently to a town seven miles …

Recent articles in Dissent on health care (Winter 1994 and Spring 1994) have been valuable but add up to less than might be hoped. Not so long ago it was often true that one could predict the left’s position on …

Stanley Hoffmann’s description of the world confronting U.S. policymakers is characteristically complex in its analysis and clear in its definition of policy choices. Moreover, Hoffmann’s work over many years provides a basic approach to the making of foreign policy. He …

Why does the transition to liberal democratic politics present such intractable problems in the Arab world? Just as liberalism appeared to triumph in much of the rest of the world, most of the Arab world retreated from it. In the …

Stanley Hoffmann’s title “What Should U.S. Foreign Policy Be?” confines him to writing a prescriptive piece and far be it from me to fault an author for not doing what he didn’t set out to do. Still, I found myself …

Editors: It is true, as Dennis Wrong wrote (“PR on PC” Spring 1994) that political correctness has been widely discredited and often ridiculed (though it is significant that this happens far more often outside than inside academia). However, the fact …

Heterodoxy is a newish (since 1992) tabloid-sized monthly with an announced narrowness of focus: PC on campus. Its pages, festooned with exploding firecrackers and other crude line drawings, are full of virulent attacks on what it alternately sees as a …

This White House seems to have no foreign policy vision and no interest in developing one. This is a bad political mistake—even for an administration that would prefer to focus “like a laser beam” on domestic problems. It is the …

The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the cold war have changed the face of international politics. What should American foreign policy be in these new circumstances? Dissent asked Harvard’s Stanley Hoffmann to outline an answer to …

On the corner of 17th and Broadway, in an African-American section of Indianapolis, there is a vacant space comprising two unused lots, sections of two parking lots, and the edge of a small park. On the evening of April 4, …

About a week before Arafat, I visited Jericho to see how “the autonomy” (as my Israeli friends call it) was faring. It was, that week, faring well. The city, bedecked in Palestinian flags, was quiet; the old police and new …

From time immemorial the prime agency of individual and social reproduction has been inertia, the biological form of which is instinct and the cultural form, tradition. That is to say, things were done because they had been done before— an …

Alas, the editors of Social Text have discovered that my article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which appeared in Social Text #46/47, is a parody. In view of the important intellectual and political issues raised …

Characteristically, Stanley Hoffmann assesses the challenges facing American foreign policy with the touch of a master: broad brush strokes set on an enormous canvas, with impressive attention to nuance. The stance adopted is neither critical nor apologetic, but rather magisterial: …