The New Old Europe by Perry Anderson Verso, 2009, 548pp., $39.95 When the history of the present era is written, it will be interesting to see which institutions, ideologies, and reputations survive the Great Recession of 2008. Some casualties are …
The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, 496 pp., $29.95 Rescuing Justice and Equality by G.A. Cohen Harvard University Press, 2008, 448pp., $47.50 Contemporary political philosophy starts from John Rawls’s theory of justice. …
Death by Gender Editors: I am more than a little perturbed at the headlining of my article “Death By Gender” on the cover of the Spring Dissent. “Honor killings” as a category is not a “feminist” issue (which many readers …
Last fall, we invited a number of prominent American intellectuals who are not editors of Dissent to participate in a forum about the culture and politics of our country. It seems a good time for such a discussion. Both U.S. …
Tree Spiker: From Earth First! To Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan St. Martin’s Press, 2009, 272 pp., $24.99 Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save America’s Wilderness by Dean Kuipers Bloomsbury, …
Edward wasn’t doing his work. I had given the twelfth graders in my summer school class the following writing assignment: “Have you ever done something that you regretted or that made you feel guilty?” We were reading John Knowles’s A …
The editors’ question about how intellectuals should “participate in American politics” highlights (for me, at least) how the meaning of the word “intellectual” has expanded since 1952, when the editors of Partisan Review organized the famous symposium that has inspired …
What has happened to Craig Becker illustrates why progressives are disappointed by the first year of the Obama administration—and why they should not stop supporting it. A year ago, Obama nominated Becker, a distinguished lawyer who has worked for the …
How does a young acolyte of the secular Left find his way to divinity school? There are times when, walking to my “Introduction to the New Testament” class in the cold Chicago morning, I ask myself that question. Part of …
The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, trans Yael Lotan Verso, 2009, 332 pp., $34.95 Everyone has heard of Attila and his Huns, who fought their way on pony back from the northern borders of China to the …
Michelle Rhee, the school chancellor of the District of Columbia Public School System (DCPS), is standing behind me in the ladies room of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. I start to sweat. I feel as if I’m standing …
Progressives have wailed against “market fundamentalism for the last quarter-century. They complain that conservatives want to eliminate the government and leave everything to the market. This is nonsense. The Right has every bit as much interest in government involvement in …
Come to Perth next year and give us a keynote address. That was the gist of an e-mail I got one July day in 2008 from the Australian Society for the Study of Labor History. At the time, both the …
Sixty years ago, in The New Men of Power, C. Wright Mills made a perceptive observation about the troubled relationship between labor leaders and radical intellectuals during an era of cold war militarism and conservative advance. Wrote Mills: To have …
Let’s not make this easy. Early in the morning of March 3, 1992, after a long discussion of their racial resentments, John Ayers and Sean Riley set out from their suburban neighborhood of Silver Spring, Maryland, looking for black people …
