Politics

Strategies for Rebuilding the Left

To overcome fragmentation and launch grassroots social movements, progressive activists and intellectuals need new ways of organizing.

  • Richard Flacks
with responses from
  • Frances Fox Piven
  • John Walsh
  • Janice Fine

Race, Class, and the Democrats

A top White House pollster has written an apology for Clinton’s presidency. He had lots of work to do.

  • Ronnie Dugger

Writing About Revolution

Revolutions are acts of hope. That’s why they are the terrain of novelists as much as historians.

  • Edwin Frank

Beyond the Nationalism of Fools

We need an intellectually serious program of cooperative and engaged research, focused on the basic life conditions of Black Americans.

  • Eugene F. Rivers III
with responses from
  • Robin D. G. Kelley
  • Michael Bérubé
  • Tony Martin
  • Martin Kilson
  • Glenn C. Loury
  • Bruce Nichols
  • Lisa Y. Sullivan
  • Mark Tushnet
  • Bob Hulteen

Inventing Irving Howe

He yearns to be a socialist leader, a man of action, but what he loves is the Talmudic solitude of the written word.

  • Michael Greenberg

Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism

Our primary allegiance should be to the community of human beings across the entire world.

  • Martha C. Nussbaum
with responses from
  • Anthony Appiah
  • Harvey C. Mansfield
  • Anne Norton
  • Robert Pinsky
  • Hilary Putnam
  • Richard Sennett
  • Benjamin R. Barber
  • Immanuel Wallerstein
  • Amy Gutmann
  • Michael Dorris
  • Judith Butler
  • Leo Marx
  • Paul Berman
  • David A. Strauss
  • Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
  • Lloyd Rudolph
  • Michael Lerner
  • Charles Beitz
  • Rachel Hadas
  • William E. Connolly
  • Nathan Glazer
  • Charles Taylor
  • Herbert Gintis
  • Michael Walzer

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Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism

The life of the cosmopolitan, who puts right before country, and universal reason before the symbols of national belonging, need not be boring, flat, or lacking in love.

  • Martha C. Nussbaum

Explaining Los Angeles

  • Marc B. Haefele

Letters to the Editor: The Last Days of Bosnia?

  • Ivo Banac
  • Rabia Ali
  • Lawrence Lifschultz

An Intervention

Out of the shadow of a wall 15 feet away a pair of men emerged and blocked the sidewalk. 

  • George Packer

The Last Days of Bosnia?

Historian Ivo Banac, once described as the “political conscience of modern Croatia,” on the roots of conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

  • Ivo Banac
  • Lawrence Lifschultz
  • Rabia Ali

Reinventing the Welfare State

Welfare reform is not just for policy wonks. It’s about the world of work and family we will pass on to the next generation.

  • Nancy Fraser
with responses from
  • Frances Fox Piven
  • Lawrence Mead

The Responsibility of Black Intellectuals, Part 2

A second roundtable with Eugene Rivers, bell hooks, Randall Kennedy, Regina Austin, and Selwyn Cudjoe, with Margaret Burnham as moderator.

  • Eugene F. Rivers III
  • bell hooks
  • Randall L. Kennedy
  • Margaret A. Burnham
  • Regina Austin
  • Selwyn Cudjoe
  • Joshua Cohen

Is There a Right to Be Homeless?

Current advocacy is taking a seriously wrong turn.

  • Vivian Rothstein

Never Trust Imperialists

What’s really at stake in debates about humanitarian intervention is not human rights, but modern imperialism.

  • Christopher Hitchens

The Possibility of Humanitarian Intervention

Are states moral agents?

  • Noam Chomsky

Finding Their Voice

Kris Rondeau discusses organizing with Richard Balzer.

  • Kris Rondeau
  • Richard Balzer

Eugene Rivers’s Challenge: A Response

  • Eugene Genovese

After the Cold War: The North/South Divide

A roundtable with Randall Forsberg.

  • Randall Forsberg
with responses from
  • Joshua Cohen
  • Eqbal Ahmad
  • Jagat Mehta
  • Alan K. Henrickson

Democratic Revolution in an Age of Autocracy

Reinventing democracy requires that we create new tools of empowerment.

  • Ralph Nader

Notes from Vietnam

  • Vivian Rothstein

Is Free Speech the Enemy of Democracy?

We need a system of free expression that is both old and new.

  • Cass Sunstein

Second Proms and Second Primaries

The Limits of Majority Rule

  • Lani Guinier

The Intelligent Forty-year-old’s Guide to Rap

Rap poetry is full of cutting-edge linguistic innovations.

  • Mark Zanger
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