“Weak,” “toothless,” “worthless” and “a farce”—these were some of the epithets applied to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) labor side accord negotiated by the United States, Mexico, and Canada in 1993. Trade unionists and labor rights supporters were …
What do left intellectuals do when they know that they are too marginalized to change the world? They get busy interpreting the world, of course. And interpreting how we interpret the world, and how the non-Western “Others” interpret it, and …
Is American feminism about to become interesting again? The June 3, 1996 issue of the New Yorker opened with Betty Friedan’s comments on the Stand for Children event in Washington, D.C. Under the subhead, “A gathering heralds a shift toward …
Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg by Joshua Rubinstein Basic Books, 1996. 482 pp. $35.00. Finding a good subject is a biographer’s first hurdle, and in choosing Ilya Ehrenburg, Joshua Rubinstein flew right over the bar. What …
Democracy’s Discontent by Michael Sandel Harvard University Press, 1996. 417 pp. $24.95. Much of what follows will be rather critical of Michael Sandel’s new book. It would be particularly wicked therefore not to begin by praising some of its many …
Bill Clinton has chosen the phrase “vital center” to characterize his second term. It’s half apt and half deceptive. True, the election was a contest between his “center” and the “right.” While a good many people voted for him out …
Pop Internationalism by Paul Krugman MIT Press, 1996. 214 pp. $22.50. Paul Krugman’s Pop Internationalism is a collection of essays, most of which were previously published in Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, and similar journals. It works …
I’m pleased to have Professor Aronowitz’s confirmation that the editors of Social Text believe in the existence of an external world. But I never thought otherwise. When I asserted in the second paragraph of my parody article that “physical ‘reality’ …
Two brief anecdotes: (1) For two months I eagerly awaited the Fall Dissent, pleased as could be about the excellent symposium that my essay spurred. When it arrived I immediately phoned my uncle, a staunch, lifelong trade unionist and a …
Remarkably few recent presidential campaigns forecast the course of the following four years. Kennedy ran on the “missile gap” and generational vigor, not civil rights or the nuclear test ban. Johnson ran seeking “no wider war,” not seeking to send …
Beijing’s repression of the 1989 protest movement and the purge that followed resulted in the death, imprisonment, or exile of thousands of Chinese. With some notable exceptions, exile organizations have foundered, losing their sense of purpose or staggering under financial …
Multicultural Citizenship by Will Kymlicka Oxford University Press, 1995. 296 pp., $35. In recent years there has been a profusion of interest in the concept of citizenship—a development that is far from surprising. In her classic study The Origins of …
There’s scaffolding around the Anne Frank House on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam, the main thoroughfare in the now-trendy Jordaan section. A brochure you receive upon entering explains that the back annex needs a thorough restoration because of foot traffic …
In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s classic nineteenth-century utopian novel, Julian West falls asleep on Decoration Day in 1887 and awakens from a deep trance 113 years later at the start of a new millennium. Julian’s trance has kept him from …
One audacity of neoconservatives is their appropriation of the radical egalitarian rhetoric of the 1960s. In his recent book, The Affirmative Action Fraud, for example, Clint Bolick calls for a restoration of the Founding Fathers’ “civil rights vision.” According to …
