Fall 2024

Dissent’s editors asked a number of leading writers and intellectuals of the left to respond to the following questions: “Nineteen sixty-eight was one of the most tumultuous years in the history of the modern left. In this, its fortieth-anniversary year, …

Joanne Barkan, Paul Berman, Susan Cheever, Nicolaus Mills, Maxine Phillips, Ruth Rosen, Jim Sleeper, Michael Walzer, and Darryl Lorrenzo Wellington report from the field.

Ed. Note: Dissent does not review books by members of its editorial board, but we are happy to list books written by our colleagues. Bernard Avishai, The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace At …

The French President after his May election. Photo: Guillaume Paumier This past spring, French President Nicolas Sarkozy won 53 percent of the votes. Dissent co-editor Mitchell Cohen, Philippe Askenazy, Françoise Gaspard, Nancy L. Green, and Jean-Baptiste Soufron consider how the …

Iraqis show ink-stained fingers after voting in the January 2005 elections. Photo: Jim Goodwin (US Army) The editors of Dissent posed the following question to several respondents: Iraq has provoked the bitterest debate about American foreign policy since Vietnam. One …

The editors of Dissent asked a number of distinguished commentators to respond to the following statement and questions: For a quarter of a century, Iran has been ruled by a militant theocracy. After the shah’s regime–authoritarian, brutal, and backed by …

Is the United States facing a constitutional crisis? We posed the following question to a group of prominent writers and intellectuals who represent a range of political opinion: Many people, as politically diverse as members of the National Rifle Association …

This is a time to speak quietly and act carefully…firmly, inventively, boldly, but above all carefully. With all Americans, with decent people the world over, we mourn the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. …

Recently, a number of French intellectuals endorsed an appeal urging Europeans to address seriously the negative consequences on social life of neoliberal economic trends. The following is an abridged version of their “Call,” translated and edited for a U.S. audience. …

Editors: I very much appreciated the symposium on Jeffrey C. Isaac’s critique of a revived progressivism and his hymn to localist democracy (“The Poverty of Progressivism,” Fall 1996). Still, I am concerned that the discussion surrounding the piece so quickly …

Editors: Nicolaus Mills (Affirmative Action Symposium, Fall1995) is correct to point out that “[t]he left needs to acknowledge all that affirmative action cannot do…” and that “liberals [should] worry more about…undoing [the past] altogether [rather than compensating for it].” Affirmative …

We mourn the death of our friend and comrade, former Dissent editor George Eckstein.

Editors: It is true, as Dennis Wrong wrote (“PR on PC” Spring 1994) that political correctness has been widely discredited and often ridiculed (though it is significant that this happens far more often outside than inside academia). However, the fact …