Fall 2024

Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Richard A. Posner’s Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy

The Hope for a Common European Foreign Policy

The best thing about the impeachment fiasco is the failure of the Republicans to tempt the public into hypocrisy. The electorate refused to treat lying about one’s sex life as a big deal. This is a great boon for the …

WHEN WORK DISAPPEARS: THE WORLD OF THE NEW URBAN POOR, by William Julius Wilson. Knopf, 1996. 352 pp. $26.00. Some years back Russell Jacoby introduced the term “public intellectual.” He used it to mean the sort of nonacademic, politically concerned, …

If you go to Britain and attend a Labour party rally, you will probably hear the audience sing “The Red Flag.” That song begins, “The people’s flag is deepest red. It’s shrouded oft our martyred dead. But ere their limbs …

One of the most useful things intellectuals can do is to invent a term or phrase that flood-lights a new social situation. Society is constantly throwing up problems that are too diffuse and too complex to grasp until someone comes …

I do not see why Steven Lukes thinks that the left’s “pursuit of a commitment [to fighting injustice] . . . can be recognized only because it has advanced successive but distinctive visions or theories of justice and of the …

In 1954, the year in which he founded Dissent, Irving Howe published an essay called “This Age of Conformity” in Partisan Review. Partisan Review was the organ of what has been dubbed (by T.J. Clarke) the “Trotskyite-Eliotic” culture of the …

Andrew Ross says that “the left is temporarily enjoying its first real foothold within the North American academy.” That claim reminds me of E.P. Thompson’s remark that the Althusserians thought themselves “the first white Marxists” to arrive on British soil. …

The Founding Fathers were dubious about democracy. They thought that most of their fellow citizens knew too little to have a voice in political decisions. Writing a Constitution for a country in which few men, and fewer women, were educated …

When people on the political right talk about education, they immediately start talking about truth. Typically, they enumerate what they take to be familiar and self-evident truths and regret that these are no longer being inculcated in the young. When …