The 1980s have been named “the decade of the humanities.” In institutions of higher learning all across the country a debate is underway as to what constitutes the “tradition,” the “canon” of literary, artistic, and philosophical works worth transmitting to …
A powerful torrent during the high rains, Rio Las Canas is a trickle of muddy water from October to May. It begins ten kilometers from the city center, carving its way north past volcanic slopes, eventually feeding into the large, …
I admired Bob Lekachman long before I met him. It was not only that we shared a political perspective. an interest in the history of economic thought. and a belief that economics is too important to be left to the …
James Madison, who understood democracy better than most then or since, would have been perplexed by Sanford Levinson’s piece in the summer issue that treated interpretations of the Constitution as mere matters of “taste.” Madison was quite sure what he …
Few periods of U.S. history have generated more debate than the Civil War era and its aftermath, what Eric Foner calls “America’s Unfinished Revolution.” And few periods have been subject to more intense investigation. The last two decades have seen …
Jürgen Habermas, one of Germany’s most important political and philosophical thinkers, gave an interview—conducted by Rainer Erd—to the Frankfurter Rundschau last March. Though it deals with specific events in West Germany, this interview should be of much interest to American …
The debate over what to teach—”the canon”, “Great Books,” core curriculum, Western civilization versus world civilization, the sins of Stanford, and so on—is one the least edifying debates of recent times. The problem is that it’s not a debate at …
At the end of 1988, UNICEF reported that half a million children had died during the year, in part because of cuts in social programs in the Third World. At the same time the World Bank estimated that in 1988 …
I heard this story several times in Stockholm: It was the final television debate before the 1982 parliamentary election. Olof Palme, then a former prime minister of Sweden, was about to speak. His Social Democratic Labor party (SAP)—out of office …
Since 1983 Breyten Breytenbach has been a naturalized French citizen, living in Paris, grateful for France’s “tolerance of political dissidents,” free to travel wherever he likes (though not to his homeland), free to write as he pleases, even “to castigate …
Gertrude Himmelfarb’s engaging, censorious collection of essays brings to mind how little the neoconservatives have affected American historical writing.* Surely no one could have predicted this failure, given both the resources at the neocons’ command and history’s notorious exposure to …
Q: How do you explain that Dissent has survive for so long? A: True grit. Q: That’s all? A: Also the generosity of a few friends and the self-taxation of our editors. Q: In a book about the McCarthy period …
Over forty years have passed since the beginnings of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War. By the standards of modern history, that is a fairly long time. We …
There is now widespread concern about the tension between America’s economic interests and its continued geopolitical role as “hegemon” of the world system. At the simplest level this tension is embodied in the escalating gap between the cost of policing …
Since the destruction of Nazi Germany,” wrote Irving Howe and I thirty years ago in the concluding chapter of our history of the American Communist party, “Stalinism has been the only political movement able to seize the initiative on a …
