Philosophers of social science have identified description, explanation, and evaluation as three distinct ways of assessing any historical phenomenon. If this triad is applied to Ellen Schrecker’s study of McCarthyism and American higher education, she earns high if not quite …
From the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, a consensus held in American society presided over by the Liberal Establishment. Generally speaking, that consensus comprised an internationalist orientation; a belief in New Deal social policies and Keynesian economics; and in culture, a …
In the Winter 1987 Dissent Roy Medvedev singled out the Soviet theater as the artistic medium most quickly responsive to cultural changes. After describing some of the politically daring plays on Moscow’s stages, Medvedev added an appropriate caveat about the …
Peru is a country that has undergone dramatic changes in the last twenty years, and some of these have taken a sad toll on both social and political institutions. Basically, the country was not prepared for such changes, and as …
It’s almost as though an “iron law” operates in all the communist countries, varied though they are. They seem haunted by the specter of democracy, especially when they seek to reform their moribund economies. Their economic growth and individual well-being …
Spring brings out robins, crocuses, and the homeless. On a May afternoon I was sitting on the bank of the Charles River in Boston, angling for the first tentative pleasures of sun and birds, when I noticed a large man …
It is a characteristic of ideological groups—on the right as well as on the left—that they feel justified in taking “positions” on everything. In this as in other respects, the neoconservative intellectuals follow in the footsteps of an earlier generation …
Readers of the New York Times discovered last fall that Irving Kristol is not only an important philosopher, economist, political scientist, and historian, but a biologist, too. In an op–ed piece titled “Room for Darwin and the Bible,” Kristol criticized …
If zeal is the essential ingredient of the crusader, I’ll never be one of the best. My primal juices flow intermittently, with long quiescent periods during which the world stumbles along without benefit of my counsel. I am, in short, …
Over the past twenty-two months, almost since the day of President Reagan’s second inauguration, the foreign policy of the United States has been controlled by a handful of military officers and their pals: freelance spies, itinerant jobbers from think tanks, …
In April 1940 the Paris-based Russian Menshevik journal, Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (SV), published an article by the famous Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding entitled “State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy?” Hilferding argued that the Soviet Union should be understood as the harbinger …
Occasionally, a book is published or a film released that leads one to realize that the old verities no longer hold. Heimat is such a work. A fifteen-and-one-half-hour film written and directed by Edgar Reitz for German television, Heimat (which …
The October 1986 issue of the neoconservative magazine the New Criterion carried an article, “Spain and the Intellectuals,” by Ronald Radosh, a member of the Dissent editorial board. All of us at Dissent speak and write as individuals; there is …
Last year, Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday. Given the odds against democratic socialist parties in the North American climate, the NDP’s survival is no mean feat. The NDP is not a splinter. Although most Canadians still …
All available signs indicate that Jesse Jackson will again run for the presidency in 1988. A prominent feature of his second candidacy will probably be implicit or explicit threats to bolt the Democratic party and run as an independent in …
