Stanley Hoffmann seems to believe that the United States cannot and really should not behave as the singular great power that it is. He offers as an alternative full American membership in “a kind of world steering committee” of various …
In May 1970, as a college student in Portland, Oregon, I took part in the national campus strike protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard. Every …
For five hundred years, Europe has been the center of world civilization. In that time, it initiated—one can even say invented—the idea and the fact of sustained economic growth. Since Galileo, it has been the cradle of modem technology, particularly …
The Waterworks is E.L. Doctorow’s latest meditation on history, memory, genius, and the City of New York. And also on municipal corruption, big-city newspapers (and toadying big-city newspaper tycoons), science, technology, the homeless, and the evils of private health care …
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 …
The dynamism of Marxism, the flowing sixties atmosphere, and the general tendency of feminist utopians to dream of amniotic bliss—all meet in The Dialectic of Sex. When one remembers that the feminist bookshelf wasn’t a foot long in 1970, the fullness, clarity and force of Shulamith Firestone’s feminism is simply amazing.
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, …
