In spite of endless analyses and premature obituaries, the subject of the American family continues to draw on a seemingly bottomless well of feelings. Barbara Ehrenreich’s witty and original account of contemporary antifamily attitudes and Brigitte and Peter Berger’s measured …
In the film Silkwood, there is a scene with particular meaning for our times. It comes after Karen Silkwood has been exposed to radiation at her job and to a new consciousness by her union. She has become motivated to …
The deployment of new missiles in Europe has occasioned severe differences of opinion within the European socialist community as well as among other Europeans. Such differences, of course, also exist on this side of the Atlantic. Below we print two …
A heated public debate in Israel, lasting from May 1980 until the outbreak of the Lebanese War in June 1982, followed Yehoshafat Harkabi’s attack on Shimon Bar Kochba, the second-century leader of the anti-Roman revolt in Judea, 132-35 C.E. (of …
Over the past 30 years, Argentina has gone through four political phases in a downward spiral. Between Perón’s ouster in 1955 and 1966 it had an unstable and exclusionary democracy, interrupted by military coups. The Perónists were proscribed; elections were …
Not long after attending the Washington Monthly‘s Neoliberal Conference last fall, I had a gnawingly incomplete exchange with one of the panelists about his movement’s prospects. He’s a young writer of fairly typical neoliberal pedigree: prep school, the chilly Harvard …
In his article, “Human Capital and Economic Policy” (Dissent, Summer 1983), Robert B. Reich offers a critique of current corporate and government programs for improving the skills of the American work force. He describes some of the impediments to the …
This article is one in a group of six that will appear in a volume entitled Alternatives: Proposals From the Democratic Left, edited by Irving Howe, © 1984 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., and …
There is a political sensibility—it can be found in the pages of The Nation, though elsewhere too—that might roughly be called “the troubles and confusions of the children of Stalinism.” Children literally, children figuratively. The writers who cultivate this sensibility …
VVhen the War on Poverty began 20 years ago, housing was one of the major battlefields. The concern then was with the reality of slums in the midst of affluence. For middle-class Americans, it was a time of economic growth …
Although political theorists who favor worker participation have often emphasized its potentialities for democratic character and its beneficial effects on democracy in the government of the state, a stronger justification, with a more Kantian flavor, seems to me to rest …
Theodore Draper contends that his title, though apparently an oxymoron, is meant to indicate the intermediate status of his essays between journalism, which deals with immediate events, and traditional history, which waits to assess them until they have indisputably acquired …
Andre Brink is a leading South African writer, one of the courageous group that has spoken out against racial injustice. The author of such novels as Looking on Darkness, A Dry White Season, and A Chain of Voices, he has …
The changes in the Soviet leadership have been of great interest not only because they represent shifts of emphasis in the U.S.S.R.’s foreign and domestic policies. Considerable attention has also been focused on the relations between the authorities and the …
There’s a Newspeak definition of “special interests.” In Reaganite language, the 97 percent of the American people whose income is less than $50,000 a year are the “special interests.” They menace the administration of the country by Adam Smith’s invisible …
