I AGREE WITH Jim Rule on the wrongness of Israeli settlement policy. I don’t believe, as he suggests, that ending American support for that policy would reduce hatred for the United States in the Arab and Muslim worlds. People who …
Dissent
Liberal Commitments
An interview with Michael Walzer on The Struggle for a Decent Politics.
Letters
Editors: Alfred Kazin (“They Made It,” Dissent, Fall 1988) suggests that I find the legal execution of innocents “acceptable” in the implied sense of “unobjectionable, “wherefore I am despicable. This is an adscititious misinterpretation. In the context “acceptable”...
Hitler and His Enemies
ONE CAN APPROACH the phenomenon of fascism from various angles. The first analyses, mostly by Communist writers, explained it simply as the dictatorship of monopoly capital (a thesis that still lingers in Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, 1941, and Ignazio Silone’s School for...
Can Life Become Better?
“LOSS OF IDENTITY” and “quest for community”—these phrases, nearly worn out from overuse by pop-intellectuals, are rescued and restored to life by Richard Sennett in this thoughtful, seminal little book about the urban condition in America. “Condition” rather than...
Artless Utopia?
ALL LITERATURE IS UTOPIAN in that fictive worlds are literally ou topos, i.e., no place. Implicitly or explicitly, literature is almost always a criticism of life because imagined reality is inevitably comparable to sensibly perceived reality. Actions can scarcely be...
Change under Communism
AFTER THE 1956 UPHEAVALS in the Communist world, and with the open outbreak of conflict between the Soviet and Chinese regimes, it became difficult to maintain the old belief that Communism was unvaried and unchanging. Yet, no matter how much …
“Pluralism” and American History
FEW SCHOLARS HAVE INFLUENCED our thinking about “extremism” as much as Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of social relations at Harvard. The first writer to apply the concept of a “radical Right” to American social movements (in 1951), he later proposed …
The Strength of Memory
WRITE a long, flowing political novel about a small group of Old Left, Anti-Stalinist socialists, tracing their paths from a youthful idealism in the late thirties to a weariness in the early sixties. Weave together their tangled personal lives and …
Mircea Cărtărescu Stares Down the Abyss
The Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu boasts a long, international-award-winning bibliography of poetry and prose. Yet in his fiction, he often speaks through narrators hostile to publication and recognition.
Collective Bargaining Through Education
Our neighborhood school, P.S. 29, is 75 per cent Negro and Puerto Rican, mostly Puerto Rican. The kids are a tough lot, coming from the tenements off Columbia Street, which runs south from Atlantic Avenue along Brooklyn’s waterfront into Red …
Know Your Enemy: Whittaker Chambers and the Freight Train of History
A discussion on the life and times of Whittaker Chambers, the Communist spy who became a conservative hero.