Western media have dubbed Czechoslovakia’s breakup a no-fault divorce. Now the two newly elected protagonists, Václav Klaus, the prime minister of the Czech republic and architect of Czechoslovakia’s economic transformation, and Vladimir Mečiar, a former communist, now a nationalist and …
No Marxist writing in English is more brilliant and learned than Perry Anderson. The publication of two collections of his essays in the aftermath, not only of the collapse of communism but also the electoral defeats of European social democracy, …
In the 1980s, democracy came to Latin America. Most countries created democratic institutions. Unparalleled opportunities seemed to open for the left. In Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, center-left governments were voted into office. Elsewhere (in Chile and El Salvador), Christian Democrats …
These two rather different voters seem to be voicing a question every voter answers at some level of thought or intuition: Whom can I trust? In the past this was mostly an implicit question that assumed that a satisfactory answer …
Joseph Buttinger was one of the last of a now almost extinct species, a self-educated worker- intellectual. He was born in a provincial Austrian town into a working-class family. His father was a highway builder and his mother a servant. …
The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 29 abortion decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey almost certainly guarantees that the central core of the Court’s 1973 holdings in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton will never again be …
“Any time environmentalism is a big issue in the news, it’s not to our benefit.” So revealed a Bush campaign strategist to the Wall Street Journal at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero last June. During the conference, third …
No small projects for Orlando Patterson. Freedom is grand in scope, heartfelt, and refreshingly old fashioned. By that I mean Patterson offers a “grand narrative” of the sort now under sustained attack in many quarters, and the very fact that …
Karl Marx ruled out any role for the market in a post-capitalist economy. “Within the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production,” he wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Program, “the producers do not exchange …
Let’s begin an argument (here in the pages of Dissent) about the future of the left—an open, many-sided, tentative, experimental argument, without manifestos or ideologically correct positions. We are in a period of uncertainty and confusion. The collapse of communism …
The resurgence of nationalism after the collapse of communism startled many observers in the West. What could have been more stark than the contrast between Western and Eastern Europe? As the European Community sought new modes of integration, nationalist virulence …
Bill Clinton had planned some remarks for the evening of Neil Kinnock’s anticipated victory in the British elections this spring—doubtless something about the global rejection of Thatcherism and Reaganism. He never delivered that speech, of course, but his private, unplanned …
The most famous European writer of the first half of the twentieth century was not Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Mann, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Rilke, Lawrence, Brecht, Gide, or Pasternak. In fact, if one could somehow quantify literary celebrity, I suspect these …
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, …
“Hitherto, it was on the periphery of the Empire that conflicts and explosions had occurred; and it must be admitted that they had not really come as a surprise. But now, it is against the very center of our system …
