Our friend and comrade Irving Howe is dead. The world knew him as the leading intellectual of the American left, a voice (often, a voice in the wilderness) for democratic and socialist values. We knew him differently. He was our …
Who is in and who is out?—these are the first questions that any political community must answer about itself. Particular communities are constituted by the answers they give or, better, by the process through which it is decided whose answers …
Jim Rule’s passionate attack on “tribalism” raises more questions than I can possibly address in a brief response. Since I by no means disagree entirely with what he writes, I want to begin by clearing up one misunderstanding. I do …
Let’s begin an argument (here in the pages of Dissent) about the future of the left—an open, many-sided, tentative, experimental argument, without manifestos or ideologically correct positions. We are in a period of uncertainty and confusion. The collapse of communism …
All over the world today, but most interestingly and frighteningly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, men and women are reasserting their local and particularist, their ethnic, religious, and national identities. The tribes have returned, and the drama of …
My aim in this essay is to defend a complex, imprecise, and, at crucial points, uncertain account of society and politics. I have no hope of theoretical simplicity, not at this historical moment when so many stable oppositions of political …
Communism has given socialism a bad name. Years of tyranny and brutality, now brought to an end almost everywhere by popular rebellions, have colored, perhaps permanently, our view of state-run economies and enforced egalitarianism. What has been called by some …
More people are working at political theory in the academic world than ever before. The field is thriving, perhaps because there is so little serious thinking and arguing about politics outside the academy. The neoconservative think tanks of the 1970s …
Since 1983 Breyten Breytenbach has been a naturalized French citizen, living in Paris, grateful for France’s “tolerance of political dissidents,” free to travel wherever he likes (though not to his homeland), free to write as he pleases, even “to castigate …
His is one of those lives that invites counter-factual questions. A founder of the Italian Communist party, a brilliant writer and devoted militant, Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by the Fascists in 1926 when he was only 35 and died in …
I am writing more than a month before the New Jersey Democratic primary, in which I shall not vote for Jesse Jackson. That would hardly be a fact worth mentioning except that large segments of the American left (including the …
I suggest that we think of the modern welfare state as a system of nationalized distribution. Certain key social goods have been taken out of private control or out of exclusive private control and are now provided by law to …
The shape and character of public space is a central issue in city planning, and it has often been central, too, in political thought, especially on the left. Radical intellectuals live in cities, think of themselves as city people, imagine …
Belatedly, the world recognizes the peculiar evil of terrorism—the murder of innocent people, the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the sense of personal vulnerability, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public places, the coerciveness of precaution. All …
For men and women of the democratic left, Albert Camus is an exemplary figure. His writing and his life, both of them enhanced, perhaps, by his early and senseless death, have taken on mythic proportions, so that we can plausibly …
