The concept of the ‘official secret’ is the specific invention of bureaucracy,” Max Weber wrote, “and nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy.” Democratic politics requires a public informed about government decisions, policies, and actions; yet government officials everywhere …
During the last decade, a grass-roots, minority-led movement against environmental racism (more recently described as the movement for environmental justice) has been spreading across urban America. Led largely by local women of color, the movement for environmental justice has received …
The Clinton administration has served the nation well by insisting upon the need for reform in our health system. But to date the debate reflects the dynamic described by Max Weber, through which a spreading pattern of technical rationality and …
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 …
