Now that the suffocating mortgage of communism has finally been lifted, opportunities for the democratic and socialist left in both East and West may have a second chance. Yet, by a curious twist of the zeitgeist many of our friends …
By the late 1950s all West European socialist and social democratic parties (I shall use the terms interchangeably) had abandoned in practice, and some in theory too, the idea of socialism as an “end-state” or “final goal.” What had been …
Being an intellectual at the end of the twentieth century means you won’t get rich, and your ideas, if you have ideas of your own, will be generally ignored. But you will get lots of chances to travel. On one …
The phrase “liberal socialism” has a strange sound to many who are accustomed to current political terminology. The word “liberalism” unfortunately has been used to smuggle so many different kinds of merchandise and has been so much the preserve of …
Poland has once again become a very interesting country. The Polish elections were overshadowed by events in Russia, but despite all the differences, recent developments in the two countries should be seen as part of the same trend. All this …
For many, the century-old conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis seemed finally to have come to an end when in September the two sides signed at the White House lawn the Declaration of Principles (DOP) regarding the establishment of a …
The tone of the symposium question is forlorn, and its terms hint at trauma and disappointment. In about equal parts, I identify with this voice, and I don’t. As a cultural group, we U.S. leftists (Old and New now shoveled …
The title of this article—”The Future of the Labor Movement in Historical Perspective”—is meant only half in jest. No one understands better than the historian that the future is beyond knowing, that there are no laws of history or cycles …
William Appleman Williams, the most influential U.S. historian since Charles an Mary Beard, was also a most curious socialist thinker. While keenly interested in Marx, he remained a romantic “socialist of the heart” who favored a decentralized, regionalist cooperativism. In …
No work of modern political philosophy, in any language, has generated such a enormous output of learned commentary as John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. After some twenty years of uninterrupted critical flow, Rawls’s new book is billed as a …
Multiculturalism is a problem today and for the foreseeable future—a problem for politics and the ethics of politics. In this essay I want to explore the implications of the liberal political philosophy I have faith in for the way contemporary …
Forty years after the founding of Dissent, and four years after the fall of communism, the words democrat and republican should be forsaken. Well, yes, these words did once denote worthy ideas. Democracy came from ancient Greek; demos (people) and …
The crash of communism coincides with a loss of faith and face on the part of social democracy. Where social democrats remain in power, as in Spain and Norway, they are reduced to trimming the public sector—for some good reasons …
The fundamental task of the left has always been to create the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to live lives of decency and dignity. I believe this task is best achieved—or has a better chance of being …
The lengthy tenure of the old New Yorker‘s editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn, has been followed by the quick succession of Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown. Both were installed by Si Newhouse, the media tycoon who bought the magazine …
