The “third way” is the subject of countless articles, op-ed columns, policy papers, international conferences, and the public pronouncements by heads of state from Bill Clinton to Gerhard Schroeder to Tony Blair. Anthony Giddens is clearly the most visible and …
I had always been sympathetic toward the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center. As a Jew whose father’s family had been murdered during the Holocaust, and as someone on “the left” for whom the civil rights movement …
For anyone who cares about democratic values, the most significant thing about the impeachment debacle was the vapidity of the surrounding debate—its failure to raise serious questions about the structure or future of American democracy. This, and not the question …
I first read about the Algebra Project in February 1993, in a New York Times Magazine article profiling Bob Moses, the legendary former field director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who in the 1960s had courageously promoted black …
Antipersonnel land mines epitomize the vulnerability and risk experienced by many inhabitants of the late modern world. The product of extraordinary scientific ingenuity and scrupulousness, conceived as an inexpensive and efficient means of controlling territory and constricting the movement of …
Mitchell Cohen’s essay “Why I’m Still ‘Left’ ” (Dissent, Spring 1997) presents a strong argument for the continuing relevance of a “left” political identity. Cohen addresses the widespread sense that “left” politics has become outmoded, a sense given powerful expression …
Two brief anecdotes: (1) For two months I eagerly awaited the Fall Dissent, pleased as could be about the excellent symposium that my essay spurred. When it arrived I immediately phoned my uncle, a staunch, lifelong trade unionist and a …
American democracy is at a watershed. The so-called “social contract” governing American politics since 1945 has broken down. Although the talk of a “Republican Revolution” is surely hyperbolic, the conservative Republican agenda has significant political momentum, and it seeks to …
It was widely expected that the Republicans would make significant gains in 1994. The Democrats were in disarray, suffering from powerful anticongressional sentiment and from too close an identification with their president, Bill Clinton, a man plagued by bad political …
The idea of civil society has a long history in Western political thought. Developed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Paine, and taken up in systematic form by Hegel, it refers to those human networks …
In this age of widespread ideological disenchantment, it is fashionable for political theorists to declare the demise of transhistorical “foundations” in political inquiry: to proclaim our rootedness in particular locales and to deny that it is possible to justify universal …
In The Rebel Camus seeks to criticize “the astonishing history of European pride” that laid the groundwork for both Nazism and Stalinism and that lies at the heart of our contemporary sense of moral confusion. The book reverberates with echoes …
