What’s the difference between socialism and social democracy? In 1991, Dissent convened several longtime contributors to answer that question, somewhat rephrased: what would distinguish socialism from a slightly improved version of Sweden?
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History predictably earned him a skeptical response when it appeared a few years ago, especially from critics on the left, many of whom, one suspects, had not read the book. (There are some notable exceptions, …
It is very difficult to write about someone much celebrated, much admired, much mourned. I will content myself with this small anecdote. A good friend was visiting one day when the mail came, bringing a letter from Irving in which …
In November 1932, in the pit of the Great Depression and within a week of Franklin Roosevelt’s election, Macmillan published Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property. The book quickly became a classic referent …
It has been a long time since I can recall such an atmosphere of economic pessimism. For two years now we have heard that the recession was over, or soon would be over, or in any case wouldn’t get worse, …
“It is not a correct deduction from the Principles of Economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest.” Thus John Maynard Keynes in an essay written in 1926 whose title Robert Kuttner has borrowed for this stunning excoriation …
I have recently posed a question to which I have no answer, but which seems to me to go to the heart of the outlook for democratic socialism, at least in the advanced capitalist countries. The question is: how far …
“Socialism,” writes Michael Harrington, “is the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face in the twenty-first century. Socialism?” he asks in the same breath: “How can a nostalgic irrelevance be the …
What lies behind the veil of economics? Vision and ideology. What does the complicated subject matter of economic analysis conceal from view? Our deep-lying, perhaps unanalyzable notions concerning human nature, history, and the like; and the various disguises by which …
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, both professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, are scholars writing from the perspective of what might be called “liberated Marxism,” a perspective that begins from Marx’s penetrating analysis of capitalism, but …
Like all social formations, capitalism is not merely a Chinese puzzle in which all elements are of equal importance in locking together the whole. In capitalism as in other regimes, a central organizing principle and its institutions influence all aspects …
Who does not know Marx’s lovely vision of life in a “communist society” where it will be possible “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, …
The following article is excerpted from Marxism: For and Against, by Robert L. Heilbroner, © 1980 by Robert L. Heilbroner, to be published by W. W. Norton & Co. late in February. Marx’s view of capitalism is essentially historic, always …
Economics and the Public Purpose, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Boston: Houghton Miflin. 334 pp. I hope I will be forgiven if I begin a discussion of John Kenneth Galbraith’s latest and most important book with a small lecture. The subject …
I think I should begin by expressing a certain caution with respect to the premise of my paper, a caution indicated by the quotation marks I have placed around the critical word postindustrial in my title. The premise is that …
