Feminists won a major victory at the UN Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo last September, making the empowerment of women the central issue of population policy. Slowing population growth will henceforth have to be addressed within the …
When we call something a problem, we are implying that a solution can be found. We are sending a signal that if we just think hard enough, consult the right experts, establish the right priorities, and then act decisively, we …
With the economy growing and inflation steady, why are so many people disgruntled? One reason may be that economic growth has not improved their standard of living. For example, in 1993, despite the economic recovery, the number of Americans below …
On the first page of his introduction, Victor Erlich refers to Irving Howe’s “still resonant” essay “The Idea of the Modern.” It was Howe, many years ago, who suggested to Erlich that he was the right man to unravel the …
David Bromwich writes powerfully and at length about the sins of “culturalism,” and my response here can only be brief and incomplete. But these are issues that we will continue to argue about in Dissent; I will look for occasions …
Hopes on the left, that social democracy might become the alternative to collapsing communism and rising market fundamentalism in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989, have proven to be chimerical. Today, except in the Czech Republic, social democracy barely exists …
In 1944, John Maynard Keynes suffered a heart attack as he ran up a flight of stairs on his way to yet another committee meeting in the New Hampshire resort called Bretton Woods. Meetings, especially those deciding the economic fate …
To intervene or not?—this should always be a hard question. Even in the case of a brutal civil war or a politically induced famine or the massacre of a local minority, the use of force in other people’s countries should …
In September 1945 Rose Coser and I were new graduate students in the Department of Sociology at Columbia. She was from the beginning a vivid and forceful presence who used to sit in the front of Robert K. Merton’s classes …
As far back as the “New Economic Policy” initiated by Lenin in the early 1920s to set the war-torn Soviet economy back on its feet, the idea of combining markets with socialist forms of property ownership has had considerable appeal …
A striking fact of twentieth-century history is the tenacity with which ethno-national groups have maintained their distinct identity, institutions, and desire for self-government. There are few examples in this century of national minorities—that is, national groups who share a state …
The abbreviation of the 1994 baseball season depressed millions of Americans, but it was crushing for fans of the New York Yankees. What a team we had: not Murderers’ Row, maybe, but strong up the middle, deep on the bench, …
During the 1950s and early 1960s, nonviolent protesters challenged legalized racial segregation and discrimination in the only two places on earth where such blatant manifestations of white supremacy could be found—the southern United States and the Union of South Africa. …
Hume said that absolute monarchy was “the easiest death, the true Euthanasia, of the British constitution.” I offer some notes and questions about a line of political apologetics that if pursued far would lead to the euthanasia of liberal society. …
The occupation of Haiti, the first progressive American military intervention since World War II, has also been one of the least supported. In the days leading up to the bloodless invasion, it was nearly impossible to find any American backers …
