Saved from Hypocrisy  

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  

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, …



Back to Class Politics  

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 …





Richard Rorty Responds  

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 …



Movements and Campaigns  

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 …



On Intellectuals in Politics: A Reply  

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. …