One night last fall, eating my dinner somewhat hastily between an afternoon meeting and an evening meeting, I picked up the latest issue of Dissent (Winter 2013), opened it at random, and began reading. Immediately my feeling of being rushed …
When Irving Howe died suddenly, in May 1993, no one was sure whether Dissent would keep going. The magazine’s young-ish editors and writers wanted to see it continue, but we all felt that it would thrive only if Michael Walzer …
Dissent has recently acquired a fax machine—not, to be sure, the very latest model, the cast-off of one of our editors who is “upgrading,” but a new machine for us nonetheless. Will this make us more efficient? Maybe so, and …
What has happened to the young men and women of the New Left? The movement is invisible these days, a specter regularly invoked only in neoconservative writings. Where have all the “kids” gone? Many of them are simply burnt out, …
“Liberty,” Herbert Marcuse writes, “is self-determination, autonomy … But the subject of this autonomy is never the contingent, private individual as that which he actually is or happens to be; it is rather the individual. . . who is capable …
The virtually total inability of ordinary citizens to affect decision making, leaves resistance as the only possible response to the misuse of governmental power and to decisions wrongly made.
