Before the 1950s, southern history was, for the most part, a provincial backwater of American historiography. Only in its role as protagonist in the sectional controversy and the Civil War did the South receive much attention from mainstream interpreters of …
Writers on the left have generally looked upon religion from two opposing perspectives. Beginning in the nineteenth century socialists influenced by Marx’s writings tended to regard religion as a species of “false consciousness” that must be extirpated before the working …
For many Americans Kurt Waldheim’s resounding victory in Austria’s run-off presidential election last June (he received nearly 54 percent of the vote, after finishing just shy of a first-round win) illuminated the dark side of a country more famous for …
Underlying the continuing financial advantage of the Republican party over the Democratic party are changes in the sources of cash for each party that have significant consequences for both policy and candidates. For the Democratic party, the pressure to raise …
Modern conservatives since Edmund Burke have held a difficult position, at least in part because of the distinctiveness of their view. They defend the things of the past, and are inclined to respect history; and yet, it is a foregone …
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, both professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, are scholars writing from the perspective of what might be called “liberated Marxism,” a perspective that begins from Marx’s penetrating analysis of capitalism, but …
J. Michael Luhan’s description of the AFL-CIO’s American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) in El Salvador (Dissent, Summer 1986) is fundamentally distorted by the ideological, cold war lens through which he views events. He magnifies “facts” that support a …
The “tax reform” legislation—which at this writing still awaits final approval by Congress and the president—has been acclaimed by conservatives and liberals alike. It would presumably distribute the tax burden more fairly, exempt most low-income earners or radically reduce their …
Michael Walzer’s “Notes on Public Space” is a valuable reopening of a debate that in the past has been very important to radical thought. I will here suggest that qualitative and aesthetic issues like this one may have an exemplary …
Having closely tracked the UAW for more than forty years of its fifty-year history, through two auto worker parents, three years on a Dodge main assembly line, a decade of working for it, and a husband with thirty-five years as …
At first glance, it’s a standard commercial for pain relievers—neutral background, earnest expert. Then, suddenly, this figure risks undermining the authority we had automatically ceded to him as he confides that “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on …
Karl Marx, writing in the 1840s, developed a perspective that can help us see why modern men and women have a special need for public space, and also why the historical forces that create this need make it especially hard …
Lester Thurow’s The Zero-Sum Society (Basic Books, 1982) provoked a storm of protest from liberals and leftists who charged that Thurow’s emphasis on the need for economic growth represented an abandonment of concern for working people and the poor. Apparently …
As Charles Krauthammer recounts in this collection of his essays, he came to the New Republic in the late 1970s because, “uniquely among intellectual organs, the New Republic was trying to rescue liberalism from its drift toward defeatist isolationism, and …
Taking the train from Westchester County to Grand Central Station, you pass some dreadful slums. The abandoned houses in these neighborhoods are boarded up, but some are adorned with fake windows—”Occupied-Look” decals—that are supposed to trick you into believing they …
