What I found most surprising in Iris Young’s analysis (“Making Single Motherhood Normal,” Winter 1994) is the radical disconnection between her policy proposals and the constraints and possibilities of our current situation. She calls for “massive increases in state support …
W.E.B. Du Bois was a titan among African-American intellectuals and the central figure in black protest politics during the first half of the twentieth century. His record of achievements during his long life (he lived to be ninety-five) is astonishing …
After Thatcher, after Reagan, after the cold war, what remains of the “special relationship” between Britain and America? There has always been less there than meets the eye. In the nineteenth century, a special feeling for the English was nurtured …
More than a thousand people die of cancer every day in the United States. For every American alive today, one in three will contract the disease; one in five will die from it. Cancer is the plague of the twentieth …
Jose Figueroa does not understand why the Plaza de Espafia supermarket sells frozen Minute Maid orange juice imported from the United States when a dozen poor Nicaraguans hawk bags of sweet oranges in the supermarket’s parking lot. He is bewildered …
Fully achieved, Iris Young’s proposals would be a disaster for women and children, probably for men too, and certainly for liberal and left politics. She is wrong on three points, at least: single mothers are not despised; liberals don’t view …
Why do we still care about the New York Intellectuals? Partly, perhaps, because they embodied, conceivably for the last time in American history, a venerable modern ideal, practiced also by the philosophes and praised by Goethe and Marx: vielseitigkeit or …
The anti-NAFTA coalition saw the battle as a prelude to future mobilization against more serious international threats to American workers’ living standards. But if there is to be any such mobilization, NAFTA opponents will have to move from simply opposing …
Two general attitudes seem to surface in all arguments about the post-Yugoslav wars. The first is the one with which Denitch begins: Slays of all sorts are annoyed if it is suggested that some special historical curse attaches to them …
I must admit that I felt ambivalent about responding to these questions. My ambivalence derives not from my attitude toward the history of Dissent, but from a certain discomfort with the way the questions have been formulated. It would be …
Carlo Rosselli was a socialist before becoming a liberal socialist. He was a sui generis socialist, because from the beginning socialism for him was a moral ideal totally free of Marxist orthodoxy. Rosselli’s first explicit adherence to socialist ideas goes …
The question is malposed. Unless and until things change dramatically for the better, here and abroad, there will be bright dreams and hopes for a different order. Dissent‘s particular contributions to those dreams come in many ways, not least out …
I write these thoughts on Dissent’s future with a copy of the Spring 1956 issue lying next to my typewriter—part of a fairly complete collection that I cherish immensely. The Spring 1956 issue contains articles that cut across the gamut …
It’s hard to imagine how Port-au-Prince could be a worse place than the city I visited last March, but eight months later reports say that the bodies are turning up in greater numbers than at any time since the September …
Midway through Norman Rush’s award- winning novel Mating, a renowned leftist sociologist named Nelson Denoon rails against those who turn socialism into “an orientation or aesthetic or feeling.” For Denoon socialism is about “concrete institutional propositions that could be shown …
