Lewis Coser, who died July 8 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of the last of an intellectual generation. This is true in the literal sense that he, along with Irving Howe, Stanley Plastrik, and a small nucleus of others, invented …
I appreciate many of Michael Walzer’s thoughts on current Israeli-Palestinian conflicts (“The Four Wars of Israel/Palestine,” Fall 2002)—a topic on which he and I have often had trouble seeing eye-to-eye. The best part of his message is his insistence that …
I do not support an American attack against Iraq under current conditions. Such an attack would be justified only with a broad spectrum of international support, based on a convincing consensus of imminent and extraordinary danger. Both disarmament and regime …
How long has it been since we heard that old catchphrase “late capitalism”? The collapse of the Soviet Empire, and the rush of the leftovers of “real existing socialism” to find a place in the global market economy, give that …
The terrorist attack on September 11 evidently had two purposes. First, to inflict on ordinary Americans pain of the sort widely meted out to other civilian populations around the world by those who oppose their governments. Second, to polarize the …
We live in bubble times. The stock market orbits at record highs, apparently bound only by the untested dynamics of the “new economy.” Novel industries sprout like mushrooms, purveying goods and services that most people could hardly imagine a few …
My friend and colleague Ian Roxborough draws from a fund of expertise in military matters rare among our Dissent circle. He properly points out some unanswered questions in my exposition; let me try to return the compliment. Two kinds of …
As I write, the United States has all but entered into full-scale war in Yugoslavia. Almost forgotten in the current preoccupation with the Balkans is the endemic, smoldering combat being waged by America and its allies with Iraq. Ordinary Americans …
Horst brand faults me for failing to identify market ideology as a “coherent system of thought, embodying a politically legitimating purpose.” I don’t think that this charge withstands even a casual reading of my essay, which inveighs at length against …
When historians of ideas go to work on the last decade of the twentieth century, the market will surely appear as one of our intellectual totems. What the Rights of Man were to the French Revolution—or what Manifest Destiny or …
Generating political action from private resources poses some sticky problems for the democratic left. We value grassroots political action—so we like the idea of electoral campaigns and other forms of politicking as populist, participatory activities. But we also deplore the …
Above the Law: Secret Deals, Politics Fixes, and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice by David Burnham Scribner, 1996. 444 pp. $27.50. David Burnham is one of America’s most distinguished investigative writers. During his years as a reporter …
Dissent has always taken pride in its openness to a range of democratic and egalitarian ideas, its refusal to impose a “party line.” This makes for bracing intellectual exercise, as one follows the converging and colliding trajectories of its editors’ …
“Nobody reads Dissent but a bunch of old lefties.” So said one of our friends in the course of discussions about the magazine’s future after Irving Howe’s death last year. The remark was meant as a provocation, and so the …
Concern for the environment is hardly a single mind-set. A look through a few of the many environmental magazines quickly reveals its seemingly infinite permutations and combinations. At one point on the spectrum, we find down-to-earth journals like Garbage, featuring …
