This past summer the bones of Czar Nicholas II and his family, dug out of the basement in Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg in 1918), were solemnly reburied in St. Petersburg according to the rites of the Orthodox Church, with Boris Yeltsin, president …
Our interview with the leader of the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, Massimo D’Alema, suggests the difficulties faced by European social democracy as it struggles to adjust to, but also to resist, the material and ideological power of the …
Our interview with the leader of the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, Massimo D’Alema, suggests the difficulties faced by European social democracy as it struggles to adjust to, but also to resist, the material and ideological power of the …
Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets by Robert Kuttner Knopf, 1997 410 pp $27.50M This is an immensely valuable book that has not gotten the attention it deserves. The reasons for its (relative) neglect have to do …
I want to talk as a philosopher today—a practical and engaged philosopher. I won’t argue for particular policies, but I also won’t remain at the level of abstract principles. If philosophy is to engage with politics, it had better be …
It has been said about Dissent’s editors and writers that we turn to culture only when politics is impossible for us, when the left is defeated or in the doldrums. Cultural criticism is an antidote for, or a diversion from, …
All political systems are subject to corruption, but not to the same kind of corruption. The corruptions of American democracy are determined by two things: the radically unequal distribution of wealth in our society and the private financing of political …
Socialist internationalism was originally based on beliefs that few of us hold anymore: that the workers of the world have no country; that the struggle against oppression is the same everywhere; that, even if there are different national “roads” to …
I first encountered Bernie Rosenberg in Social Science B at Brandeis, where we read mimeographed chapters of Max Lerner’s forthcoming book on American civilization, and Max sat on the stage of the largest lecture hall on campus and talked, with …
I had planned an editorial on Bosnia for this page—a diatribe against the moral blindness and complacency of European governments and the leadership failure of our own, against the cowardice of NATO and the weakness and confusion of the UN, …
This issue of Dissent is focused on American politics, a natural theme for the season and the year. But we are not concerned here with how to vote in the presidential election, which doesn’t seem a difficult (though it may …
Jews are not officially a minority in the United States today, but we were once, when I was growing up, the quintessential minority. We were the model with reference to which everyone else’s moral and political attitudes were determined Other …
The Arguments section has been the liveliest part of the last few Dissents (and judging from readers’ responses, the most popular). The actual arguments have focused, several times now,on race and politics in America, and so we decided to treat …
You all know the phrase “a ballplayer’s ballplayer,” which describes someone whose qualities are best appreciated by people in the game. Manny was a socialist’s socialist, a dissenter’s dissenter. Only people close to the magazine can even begin to understand …
A lot of good people came to Washington last October 16. Surveys published afterward suggest that the “million men,” whatever their actual number, were a substantial representation of the African American working class and middle class (except that both these …
