Gertrude Himmelfarb’s engaging, censorious collection of essays brings to mind how little the neoconservatives have affected American historical writing.* Surely no one could have predicted this failure, given both the resources at the neocons’ command and history’s notorious exposure to …
Q: How do you explain that Dissent has survive for so long? A: True grit. Q: That’s all? A: Also the generosity of a few friends and the self-taxation of our editors. Q: In a book about the McCarthy period …
Over forty years have passed since the beginnings of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War. By the standards of modern history, that is a fairly long time. We …
There is now widespread concern about the tension between America’s economic interests and its continued geopolitical role as “hegemon” of the world system. At the simplest level this tension is embodied in the escalating gap between the cost of policing …
Since the destruction of Nazi Germany,” wrote Irving Howe and I thirty years ago in the concluding chapter of our history of the American Communist party, “Stalinism has been the only political movement able to seize the initiative on a …
I wonder how we incorporate the images we receive through the media. Do we take them as fact, believe what we see? Or if not, how do we use what we don’t literally believe? The question is raised in new …
In the early days of this wave of the women’s movement, I sat in a weekly consciousness raising group with my friend A. We compared notes recently: What did you think was happening? How did you think our own lives …
The land around the Fernald uranium processing plant in southwestern Ohio is rich enough to grow most anything. But for the plant’s neighbors the standing joke is that pumpkins are the crop to raise: “They don’t need a candle at …
The present crisis in Hungary was preceded by an unusually long period of tranquility. We should first examine the roots of this exceptional political stability lasting over a quarter of a century. We have to start by stating a historical …
Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 was in part the result of Jimmy Carter’s failure to respond to high unemployment and inflation. Carter’s austerity program (in 1979, when millions of people were without work, Carter proposed a $25 billion cut in …
One good reason to read this book is that it directly addresses the current right-wing attack on university attempts to modernize their course offerings. As the New York Times reported on November 22, 1988, that attack is spearheaded by complaints …
You might say that my first encounter with Joe Clark was not entirely friendly. He was speaking at a Communist rally in the Bronx, and several young Socialists, I among them, went with the intention of heckling. We tried, but …
From Plato’s Republic to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia to B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two and beyond, many social theorists have tried to design, even to build, an ideal human community. It is a prospect that many view with ambivalence. As …
When people on the political right talk about education, they immediately start talking about truth. Typically, they enumerate what they take to be familiar and self-evident truths and regret that these are no longer being inculcated in the young. When …
We are today on the rising slope of a third technological revolution. It is a rising slope, for we have passed from the plus-minus stage of invention and innovation into the crucial period of diffusion. The rates of diffusion will …
