Ideas of Justice  

The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, 496 pp., $29.95 Rescuing Justice and Equality by G.A. Cohen Harvard University Press, 2008, 448pp., $47.50 Contemporary political philosophy starts from John Rawls’s theory of justice. …



Andreas Gursky: Global Photographer  

Sometimes the essence of a societal moment is well captured by an individual artist. Such is the case for German photographer Andreas Gursky, whose work—displayed this spring in his first retrospective (1984-2000) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—captures …



The Family: What Do We Really Want?  

How should democratic socialists think about the family and its role in modern society? The essential problem is to find alternatives to individualist and marketized conceptions of social life. Solutions to this problem are most commonly sought in the political …







Remembering Irving Howe  

About ten years ago during a stay in the United States I was lucky enough to be invited to attend one or two meetings of the Dissent editorial board held (as I recall) in the living room of Simone Plastrik’s …



British Labour After Defeat  

Recent events in Britain offer little cheer for anyone committed to democratic socialism. After what was widely held to be Labour’s most effective election campaign in twenty years, Labour gained a share of the vote that was only 3.5 percent …



The Fall and Rise of Public Space  

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 …



What Labour Did in Office  

In the general election that took place in the spring of 1988, Mrs. Thatcher was eventually defeated. The dominant issue was unemployment, as it had been for two or three years prior to the election, since the end of the …