Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information
The simple clarity of "left" and "right" ideologies has
never matched the complexities of political, economic, and cultural life.
It has long been the case, for example, that liberalism on social issues
- from race relations to gun control to abortion rights - has not necessarily
been correlated with economic liberalism. Indeed, the fact that the
term "economic liberalism" has had opposing meanings in Europe and the
United States indicates that the categories of left and right have long
been uncertain. And in recent years, particularly since the fall
of the Berlin Wall and the "revolutions" of 1989 (see Andrew Arato below),
we have moved from uncertainty to confusion.
In the former Yugoslavia, not only are Marxist opportunists
rapidly becoming nationalist opportunists, but, what is more telling, Mihajlo
Markovic, a former Marxist humanist of the famous Praxis group, has become
a rabid nationalist and chief ideologist of ethnic cleansing. In
Poland and Hungary, those in the left wing of the old democratic opposition
are the most articulate supporters of the market transition, while in the
Czech Republic, the Right is at the forefront of such support. In
Russia, the Left supports political economic reform, while in the Baltics
the Left opposes reforms, or at least wants to slow them down. Closer
to home, the left/right political common sense is no less confusing.
At a time when the Republican Party is in disarray, with a breakdown of
the "right consensus," and with the Moral Majoritarians opposing the supply-siders
opposing the neoconservatives, the Democrats struggle over exactly what
it means to be a "New Democrat."
Politics Without Clichés
Despite all this, the breakdown in the old
left/right dichotomy is refreshing. It provides us with opportunities
to think about "politics without clichés," as Jean Bethke Elshtain
puts it in this issue. We can address problems anew, without stale
preconceptions and without ideological distortions. It becomes possible
to address basic principles and concrete ends without partisan rigidity.
When the Right was clearly capitalist and the Left
was socialist, each presented a complete account of how certain fundamental
economic arrangements could lead to the common good. For the Right,
from Hayek to Friedman, the free market was the cornerstone of free politics,
free culture, and a free society based on individual liberty. Take
away the freedom of economic exchange, whether through state redistribution
schemes or even trade-union activity, and the road to serfdom was in view.
For the Left, from Marx to Sweezy, the abolition of private property was
the cornerstone of free politics, free culture, and a free classless
society. Abolish or at least control the irrationality of the market,
and the good society would be within reach.
Both the Left and the Right, at least at their extremes,
had a propensity for disregarding the messy details of societal life.
As voices on the right saw tyranny in union activity which constrained
trade, some on the left denied that such activity fundamentally changed
the lot of the industrial working class; only a socialist transformation
could truly accomplish that goal. Of course, there were many on the
left and the right who avoided such gymnastics, people who recognized that
under certain conditions economic efficiency and productivity could be
enhanced by union activity and "state intervention" (most strikingly in
the postwar German Federal Republic). These people also recognized
that private property and entrepreneurship expand productivity more readily
than state or social ownership, at least under certain conditions, and
this expansion may serve the interests of the unpropertied as well as the
propertied (strikingly in Sweden). As left/right thinking wanes,
such recognition presents real opportunities to reconceptualize our understanding
of the relationship between economics and politics, and to chart public
policies that view economic arrangements not as reflections of metaphysical
convictions but as the pragmatic means to achieve specific social goals.
Thus proposals for public investment in infrastructure, from public transportation
to highways to public education, and for tax credits for certain forms
of private investments, can be appraised for their promised results, and
not in the teleological terms of left and right.
It should be recognized that more is involved here
than an instrumentalist technocratic politics. An "economics without
clichés" can be supported by a reinvigorated politics. At
the height of the cold war, the central political value of Western culture
- freedom - often seemed to be little more than an empty ideological weapon,
as in "the free world versus the communist world." A complex civilizational
accomplishment1 was reduced to a Manichaean geopolitical contest.
In the hands of our most ardent anticommunists, freedom became a crude
weapon. Without the superpower contest, we can and must pay attention
once again to the central value.
The temptation is to identify freedom with the free
market and private enterprise. With the collapse of state socialism,
many would have us believe that a new age of freedom and liberty has automatically
arrived. Just let the market do its magic and all problems will be
solved, normative as well as instrumental. Liberals along with conservatives,
when appraising postcommunist reconstruction, have tended to overemphasize
the importance of free-market reforms and to downplay the significance
of political and cultural freedom. They seem to believe that with
a free-market base, all political and cultural difficulties will be readily
resolved. Overlooked are such requirements as a legal political order,
sound political parties, and a well-functioning educational system.
The freedom of the market cannot directly address the problems of political
independence, that is, of sovereignty and nationalism, and even its relationship
with freedom of speech is quite ambiguous. The political confusion
in much of Central Europe, the real instability in the republics of the
former Soviet Union and the barbarism in the former Yugoslavia, clearly
push us away from this naive position.
In the past, the Right minimized the tension between
free speech (and culture) and the free economy, while the Left emphasized
this tension. Looking at the statist system of the old communist
block, the Right's position does seem to have a great deal to recommend
it. Overall, the statist system of cultural production was more repressive
than the market system of the old political West. Clear ideological
constraints on the exchange of ideas, enforced by the party-state apparatus,
precluded open free speech, while the absence of such constraints, with
states relatively uninvolved in supporting or controlling cultural exchange,
did and does encourage such free speech. Yet the statist system did
open up some opportunity for independent public expression. Cultural
traditions were kept alive. Often critique was not impossible, from
Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch to the Marxist
humanism of the "Lukacs Circle" and the "Praxis Group." And on the
other hand, the market system often did and does constrain public discourse.
The requirements for a free exchange of ideas are not always the same as
the requirements for a free exchange of goods, and unmarketable ideas may
not reach their public. From serious programming on commercial and
noncommercial television to serious writing in the new New Yorker
magazine, commerce in America does restrict what can and cannot be presented
to a broad public. While it may be the case that overall a market-based
economy provides broader possibilities for the free exchange of ideas,
this does not mean that market freedom equals cultural freedom.
One of the great ironies of the postcommunist
transition is that, empirically, the opposite seems to be the case all
around the old block. With the dismantling of the old repressive
apparatus, the old ways of circumventing repression and using state support
for independent and critical cultural work have been undermined, while
neither the market support of independent works (for example, in specialized
publishing systems) nor the extramarket support of independent works (for
example, through foundations and philanthropy) have developed. Ironically,
the marketization of cultural life has meant an increased restriction of
cultural life.
The old Left would knowingly take such irony and
push its old theme: fetishized culture, a commodity culture, yields a repressed
culture. But if the goal is to expand free discourse, fundamentalist
support or opposition to the market must be abandoned, and more practical
questions about public debate and culture should be addressed. What
conditions of public and private support will keep ongoing cultural traditions
alive? Which policies will expand and enliven ongoing public exchange
of cultural works and ideas? And what institutional arrangements
will permit the cultural world to develop on its own terms, relatively
independent of both the logic of the market and the imperatives of the
state?2 A blend of state, market,
and philanthropic support of the cultural world is fittingly emerging in
Central Europe with some very notable successes; for example, the rise
of a commercial press has opened journalism, producing remarkable examples
of journalistic excellence like Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza.
But there have been, as well, striking challenges, like the uncertain support
of the educational system.
Privatization clearly works much more easily in
some sectors than in others. This insight, which has long been a
component of American political culture, is exemplified by the subsidized
post office, the public education system, and, more recently, the National
Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. In the last moments of the
ideological cold war, laissez-faire ideologists wanted the public to abandon
the republican motivations for such nonmarket enterprises. With the
collapse of the Berlin Wall, Milton Friedman even launched an aggressive
polemic against our "domestic socialism," referring to the post office.
With the weakening of the ideological battle, his imagined escalation of
the war against socialism falls flat.
For the ideologically inclined, the "culture wars"
have become central.3 In the disturbed
regions of the former Soviet Union and its dependencies, these wars have
concerned competing nationalisms. Freedom has been defined as national
sovereignty and self-determination. In the United States, in contrast,
group autonomy and self-determination have had the central focus, ranging
from the particularities of religion, gender, and race to the more general
question of the pursuit of the common good and the celebration of difference.
Yet, despite the differences between Europe and America, the distance between
Sarajevo and the multicultural America is not so great, at least theoretically,
when it comes to questions of identity, as Morris Dickstein explores in
this issue.
In the United States, as in Bosnia and East and
Central Europe, identity politics are on the rise. The consequences
are much more deadly on the old European killing fields, but they may be
just as debilitating to democracy in America. In Europe, the old
national questions are again being posed. The nationalist Right would
have us believe that this is both inevitable and for the overall good,
while the internationalist Left claims that it is regression, and a lesson
that the old order of "previously existing socialism" was not all for the
bad. At least it kept the old nationalist evil under wraps.
The Left downplays the degree to which the Stalinists and neo-Stalinists
manipulated nationalism to solidify their political positions. In
some cases, as in the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union,
official policies actually promoted the development of previously unknown
nationalisms.4
Further, the Left
ignores or at least fails to examine the historical correlation between
modern democracy and the development of nationalism.5
That correlation has been repeated in East and Central Europe,
where the struggle for national independence in such countries as Ukraine,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary were both democratic and
nationalistic (or at least patriotic). While later tensions between
the democrats and the xenophobic nationalists did develop, the move to
democracy and the move toward national independence were mutually supportive
in these countries. The Right has understood this well, at least
since Edmund Burke, but it is unable to critically examine the general
link between the pursuit of national independence and xenophobic politics.
Instead, it has depended upon particularistic and often tautological accounts
of national character to explain national and international tensions.
Conservative explanations for the strife in Bosnia, for example, point
to the hatreds and battles over "many centuries," overlooking the high
intermarriage rates and social peace of the postwar period. They
do not carefully explore the fact that in that part of the world, where
national groups exist side by side, the social construction of the nation-state
simply does not apply. Weighing and balancing the legitimate competing
claims of national independence and the freedom of minorities does
not lend itself to straightforward left or right solutions. There
is a need to ask fundamental questions about the dimensions and complexities
of public freedom with a clear understanding that it is not identical either
with the free market or with national sovereignty and independence.
The Politics of Identity
The American political tradition speaks to this need.
Our revolution was about public freedom. As Hannah Arendt argued
in her classic On Revolution,6 the
American Revolution was more than a war of independence. It was a
struggle for freedom, for republican self-governance and individual liberty.
In the debates of the founders, both among the Federalists and the anti-Federalists,7
there
was an ongoing contestation between those who wished to balance "positive"
and "negative" concepts of liberty in different ways. There was a
remarkable self-consciousness regarding the complexities of freedom, even
if the most glaring paradox of freedom in the United States was accepted
(for among the strongest advocates of liberty were slaveholders or those
who tolerated slavery).
Indeed, in important ways, the paradoxes of freedom
have defined the major critical periods in American history. The
Civil War addressed the issue of slavery within a polity constituted in
liberty. The New Deal moved liberalism from an antistatist position
to a position of state intervention. These periods which Bruce Ackerman
goes so far as to depict as "our second and third revolutions,"8
encompassed
fundamental changes in the way freedom was understood in the United States.
It may be the case that the American concept of liberty is predicated upon
the American form of slavery, as Orlando Pattern has suggested, but a polity
"dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could not
permanently tolerate slavery without sacrificing its fundamental identity.
And during the New Deal the free play of the market was understood as insufficient.
The depressed market so obscured the proposition of created equality that
political intervention seemed to be a necessity, aimed at giving a fair
chance to the disadvantaged from union workers to unemployed artists.
After the Depression, despite the popular conservative laissez-faire rhetoric
of recent years, such intervention became taken for granted as part of
American public life. Although there have been attacks on welfare
and big government, attempted state management of the economy and social
security programs go unquestioned. On this dimension of liberalism,
the political contest is about specific state policies, with liberals being
for more aggressive policies and conservatives against such policies.
Now, however, neoliberals and "New Democrats" increasingly
questions the saliency of government programs, while conservatives and
"Reagan Republicans" are increasingly less prudent about government finances
and deficits. On a practical level, the liberal-conservative context
is unclear, even as it continues to provide some guide to political identity.
Perhaps this is because our left and right span a more and more heterogeneous
variety of ideological spectra, as Herbert Gans maintains in his contribution
to this issue.
Nevertheless, the more fundamental American political
contest seems to revolve around problems of group and identity. This
has always been more the case in the United States than in Europe.
Although laissez-faire economics has long been the predominant position
of the American Right, while government activism has been the position
of the Left, issues of identity, specifically of race, have long "confused"
the politics of economic policy and mobilization. At the founding,
anti-Federalists worried that the hetereogenity of the American states
and their populations would doom to failure a more centralized republic.
Following the conventional wisdom of political theory, from Aristotle to
Montesquieu, they believed that republican freedom was achievable only
in relatively small, homogeneous polities. But with the adoption
of the American Constitution, this position was cast aside, and with the
Northern victory in the Civil War, it was defeated. The diversity
of American states could no longer be used as grounds for their disunion.
But diversity has continued to present severe political
challenges. Racial and ethnic differences have long played a key
role in American politics. Racism has been as much a part of trade-union
policy as it has been of management practice. Ethnic diversity has
shaped the development of specific institutions from political machines
to Hollywood movies studios. Nonetheless, the ideal of integration
into the social, political, economic, and cultural mainstream long prevailed
among privileged and unprivileged groups. This situation has now
changed.
Formerly, the Left's general position was to push
for integration, thus opening up opportunities for new immigrants and African
Americans. The culmination of this strategy of inclusion was the
civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s. The Right, on the other
hand, had a more "go-slow" approach. On very traditional conservative
grounds, the Right was wary of upsetting the social order, and that meant
the continued exclusion of some (primarily blacks) to the benefit of others
(whites). On more traditionally liberal grounds, some American conservatives
worried that the government's enforced integration of blacks into societal
power centers would compromise the individual freedom to choose to associate
with whomever one wished, and to conduct economic activities without state
interference. Now, after the significant successes of the civil rights
movement, this left-right distinction has also become confused. Parts
of the Left have moved from seeking integration to seeking empowerment
through kinds of exclusions (the old position of the Right), while those
parts of the Right which are not overtly racist endorse formal integration
through equality of opportunity, and oppose positive measures created to
address informal obstacles to equality such as affirmative action (a position
much like the old position of the Left).
The politics of identity in America as direct outgrowths
of the politics of civil rights, and the relationship between these political
positions repeats itself over and over again. For African Americans
as well as for women, for gays as well as for Latinos, for Americans in
general as well as for East European nationalists, the limits of inclusion
yield a new practice of exclusion. In the United States, the relationship
between the civil rights movement and the black power movement is archetypical.
The primary project of the civil rights movement was to remove the official
barriers to the full participation of African Americans in societal life.
The key legal barrier was the doctrine of "separate but equal". It
was successfully argued in the courts that separation necessarily led to
unconstitutional inequality in government services, in education, and in
employment and housing. The task of the social movement was to remove
these barriers (through legal action) and their consequences for full citizenship
(through social action). The movement was remarkably successful.
Schools and universities were desegregated. Government services were
delivered. Citizenship, particularly as operationalized by the spread
of the franchise and the election of black representatives, was more fully
achieved. Rarely has a social movement been more successful.
Yet with its success the limits of the movement's
aspirations became apparent. Most strikingly, with the freedom to
participate in social, political, cultural, and economic institutions,
the privileged individual members of the black community experienced high
rates of upward social mobility and increased economic, political, and
cultural power in the society, while the less privileged experienced little
or no improvement in their situation, and developed an increased sense
of relative deprivation in comparison with their more privileged peers.
At the same time, black communal institutions were weakened, with the "best
and the brightest" growing less involved with the social environment circumscribed
by race. Not surprisingly, the response of political activists was
to underscore the need to recommit resources to the community and to realize
that self-help and power, based on a strong positive African American identity,
had to be forged for those most devastated by the legacies of slavery and
racism.
From the point of view of the disempowered, then,
integration appears to be a trick, not delivering the goods at all.
The only logical response is the assertion of black power. And, it
turns out, this is a need felt not only by those left behind by civil rights
successes, but also by those who, on one way or another, have "made it".
Like other groups excluded from full societal participation because of
their differences, they have wanted to fight against exclusion without
denying their identity. In the language of the civil rights movement,
they fought for desegregation, not necessarily for integration.
This is where the general problem of identity politics
is most apparent. As the previously excluded - the "other"- establishes
rights of participation, the terms of participation may be viewed as undesirable.
It may appear to the group as requiring the sacrifice of its basic identity.
This problem classically presented itself to the Jews of revolutionary
France. Their emancipation as Frenchmen precluded their emancipation
as Jews. In order to be accepted as citizens of the French polity,
the Jewish community had to abandon some of its special customs, and cohesion.
For some, this was not acceptable. Similarly, blacks, women, gays,
and fundamentalist Christians have faced such a choice.
Liberals in general have encouraged broader participation
as an individual right, while conservatives have opted for differentiated
collective attachments. This is where things have changed.
Now it is the radical feminists, black nationalists, gays, and "Christians"
(although they are on the right) who opt for a position apart, and who
then seek to engage the polity as a well-formed group. Collective
engagement with the polity from the point of view of the group's specific
interests, memories, and experiences becomes a primary end, along with
the group goal of changing the polity in the process. The freedom
of the individual to take part is understood as conflicting with - or at
least not being the same as - the pursuit of the group identity interests
of collective self-determination. For an individual woman such as
Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka of Poland, for example, to lead a polity
does not necessarily advance feminist goals or the interests of women as
a group. The individual women (black, Jew, gay, Christian) may simply
fulfill roles already established in prevailing institutions and practices.
If the goal is to change those institutions and practices, from the point
of view of group interests and principles, fulfilling such roles is worse
than not taking part at all.
As with issues of the political economy, the politics
of identity have not straightforward left/right logic. At times,
self-determination and defense of a group seems to be a progressive position
of the Left, as for example with black power, while at other times it seems
to be regressive, or at least conservative, as with Serbian or Croatian
nationalism. But it is a daunting task to determine the grounds for
such judgment for the general public in an understandable way. Certainly
there is now an opportunity for a politics without cliché, but is
may also be a politics without meaning.
What's Left, What's Right
In the post-cold war era, it is increasingly difficult
for the general public to make sense of the available political alternatives.
A multiplicity of voices asserts positions on a wide variety of issues,
without any guidelines to their relationships. There is the problem
of coherently establishing theses relationships, both politically and intellectually.
And the problem of coherence looks different on the two sides of the old
cold war divide. In postcommunist societies, the need to constitute
the arena for political interactions is most fundamental. A sensible
political system must be established, with functioning parliaments and
political parties. The grounds for a free exchange of competing ideas
have to be supported. Free associations in a civil society must be
developed form a very rudimentary starting point. In short, a free
political arena has to be constituted. In the postanti- communist
society (so to speak), these associations, grounds, parliaments, and parties
- that is, the public arena - must be reinvigorated now that the old geopolitical
game is over.
The end of official ideology and its enforcement
throughout communist-dominated society has established the precondition
for self-governance and individual liberty. Constitutions have been
written. Elections have been conducted. A free press and culture
have developed. New political parties have been formed, without the
ideological shackles of Marxism-Leninism and the coercion of the party-state.
These ideals of Western democracies are being broadly pursued. Yet
the new political institutions and practices seem to be strikingly fragile,
particularly because there seems to be little or no direct relationship
among public opinion, election results, and political outcome. In
Czechoslovakia, most tragically, the majority of the population was against
the breakup of the multinational state. They voted for parties which
did not advocate the breakup, and yet the leaders of those parties promoted
the breakup with remarkable speed. In Poland, perhaps initially in
a more normal way, the governing and opposition parties supported programs
quite opposite to their electoral platforms, in combinations which at times
seemed to be random. Recently, some coherence seems to be emerging.
As of this writing (June 1993), the first signs of a reasonably coherent
political debate are appearing around support for or opposition to Hanna
Suchocka's policies.
Such initial disorder in the political process,
which exists throughout the old block, is not surprising in new democracies.
But the development of future coherence cannot be assured. Aside
from the unsoundness of the economies, the weakness of civil society, and
the imposed ignorance and misdirection of the community period, the breakdown
of the Left and Right adds to the problem. In the eyes of a significant
portion of the old block's population, the failures of communism have delegitimated
the Left generally. Although this varies from country to country,
with the communists and the Left viewed with more hostility in Poland and
the Czech Republic, for example, than in Russia and Bulgaria, there is
a broad rejection of leftists utopias throughout the region as a consequence
of the long and catastrophic history of communism. Nonetheless, the
population is also learning rather quickly to distrust the magical
market solutions of the liberal Right. Too many people suffer too
severely for them to support a promised better tomorrow, given their daily
realities, even when a radical transition is relatively successful, as
in Poland. When it is not successful, as in the new nations of the
former Soviet Union, a left turn should not be surprising. Thus came
the noteworthy return of the former communists in Lithuania.
Yet such a turn has little content. Voters
are choosing political parties and candidates who promise a less painful
transition. The promise is liberalization with a human face.
But how to make the transition without much pain is not actually worked
out. The issues begin to revolve around highly technical economic
arguments, which the population cannot easily judge. Votes are then
mobilized by personalities, political nostalgias for parties for the precommunist
past, or programs of national self-defense and assertion, and these grounds
for mobilization do not facilitate reasonable political contest and discussion.
In Poland, for example nostalgia for Roman Dmowski or Josef Pilsudski,
or fealty to the church, or to Cardinal Glemp, or Pope John Paul II, or
admiration for Walesa or Kuron or Suchocka, does not lead to alternative
political positions open to contestation and compromise. Rather,
it leads to a political carnival of competing performances.
Although at first glance the situation seems to
be different in the postanticommunist West, it is in fact similar.
Of course there were nation-states in the former "free world" which were
not very free: the authoritarian dictatorships of Latin America, Asia,
and Africa. In recent years, many of these, too, have been undergoing
a process of democratization. But these nations, like the more stable
liberal democracies of North America and Western Europe, have considerable
advantages relative to those of the former Soviet block. In varying
degrees, they have experience with the rudimentary institutions of a free
public arena, some experience with parliaments, a free economy, and an
independent civil society. While the distinctions made during the
cold war between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes may have been formulated
for instrumental ideological purposes, after the cold war the distinction
underscores the more radical task facing the previously existing socialist
societies. In the old authoritarian "West, " the task is to build
upon fragile democratic customs, and in the "actually existing democratic
West" the task is to forestall the enervation of democratic traditions.
That being said, the problem of a politics without
sense is present in the old political West very much as it is in the postcommunist
polities. The European and North American Left has collapsed, while
the Right is disoriented. In Great Britain, Labor could not win in
the last general election despite a severe economic recession and a weakened
and factionalized Conservative Party led by an undistinguished politician.
In France, the Communist Party has all but disappeared and the socialists
are in complete disarray, as is the whole Italian political establishment,
including the Left. In Germany, the right-wing chancellor maintained
his role by pretending that the immense and complex task of unification
would be painless, and now he and politicians in general are viewed with
severe skepticism.
In Europe there is a great deal of talk about the
demise of political leadership, and at least initially there was admiration
for the vigorous and youthful new president of the United Sates.
Yet President Clinton has also faltered, and it is probably not entirely
due to his personal shortcomings. Building and sustaining political
coalitions for effective political action has become difficult in political
arenas where it is no longer clear how political positions hold together.
When it was clear - or at least discernible - what was left and what was
right, leaders and citizens could develop broad-ranged programs and contrast
them with alternative programs. When elections were won more marginally,
coalitions could be formed and compromises could be reached. Without
a clear left and right, or some equivalent orientational spectrum, we may
have lost the grounds for concerted action and political confrontation
and compromise.
In the existing liberal democracies, this leads
at best to ineffectiveness, as for example in the United States, or at
worst to potential political collapse, as in Italy. In the newly
formed democracies, widespread political disenchantment presents the real
possibility that democracy will not get off the ground. A central
problem, then, is to give meaning to the politics without cliché.
For some this will involve an attempt to reinvigorate the left/right distinction.
Thus we find, in this issue, Richard Flack's call to redefine the Left's
position so it can again "make history," and Michael Kimmel's attempt to
discern the progressive position on the politics of gender. For others,
the task is to realistically appraise these global changes in economics,
politics, and culture so that emerging political differences can be properly
contextualized (see Madsen below). And for still others, a theoretical
reconstruction of central elements of inherited political projects - for
example, socialism, for the Left and patriotism for the Right - can recover
what was lost because of unfortunate historical contingencies (see David
Gordon's and Marcin Krol's contributions). The goal may not be, and
in my judgment should not be, to recreate the totalized grand narratives
of left and right which have made the twentieth century so meaningful and
also so deadly. Rather, the goal is to give a workable answer to
the question of what's left and what's right, so that people can understand
their political situation and politically act with some cognizance of the
problems of the political economy, and some understanding of the complexities
and dilemmas of identity and of such central political ideals as freedom
and democracy.
1 See
Orlando Patterson, Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture
(New York: Basic Books, 1991).
2
I developed a framework for considering such questions in Jeffrey C. Goldfarb,
On Cultural Freedom: An Exploration of Public Life in Poland and America
(Chicago:
University of Chicagor Press, 1982).
3
See James Davison Hunter and Kimon Howland Sargeant's
article in this issue, as well as Hunter's Cultural Wars: The Struggle
to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
4
This is explored in Bohdan Mahaylo and Victor
Swoboda, Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalist Problem in the
USSR (New York: Free Press, 1990).
5
See Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads
to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard Univeristy Press, 1992).
6
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965).
7
Herbert Storing, What the Anti-Federalists
Stood For (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
8
Bruce Ackerman, We The People: Foundations
(Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1991).
What's Left, What's Right?
Introduction
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Guest Editor
415
Politics Without Cliché Jean Bethke Elshtain 433
The Party's Over - So What Is
To Be Done?
Richard Flacks
445
Socialism: What's Left after the
Collapse of the Soviet System
David M. Gordon
471
Global Monoculture,
Multiculture, and Polyculture
Richard Madsen
493
Varieties of American
Ideological Spectra
Herbert J. Gans
513
After the Cold War: Culture as
Politics, Politics as Culture
Morris Dickstein
531
Religion, Women, and the
Transformation of Public
James Davison Hunter and
Culture
Kimon Howland Sargeant
545
Sexual Balkanization: Gender
and Secuality as the New
Ethnicities
Michael S. Kimmel
571
Being A Conservative in a
Postcommunist Country
Marcin Krol
589
Interpreting 1989 Andrew Arato 609
Andrew Arato is professor of sociology in the Graduate Faculty of the New School. His most recent book is From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory (1993).
Morris Dickstein is professor of english and film at Queens College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. His most recent book is Double Agent: The Critic and Society (1992).
Jean Bethke Elshtain is Centennial Professor of Political Science and professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Her most recent book is Power Trips and Other Journeys (1991).
Richard Flacks is professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His most recent book is Making History: The American Left and the American Mind (1989).
Herbert J. Gans is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. His most recent book is People, Plans, and Policies: Essays on Poverty, Racism, and Other National Urban Problems (1991).
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb is professor and chair of the Department of Sociology in the Graduate Faculty of the New School. He is the author of After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe (1992).
David M. Gordon is professor of economics in the Graduate Faculty of the New School. His most recent book (with Samuel Bowles and Thomas E. Weisskopf) is After the Waste Land: A Democratic Economics for the Year 2000 (1990).
James Davison Hunter is professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991).
Michael S. Kimmel is associate professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His books include Men Confront Pornography (1991).
Marcin Krol is a political philosopher and a member of the faculty of the Institute of Applied Science, Warsaw University and the Graduate School of Social Research, Polish Academy of Science. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Res Publica.
Richard Madsen is professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego. His most recent book (with Robert Bellah, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton) is The Good Society (1991).
Kimon Howland Sargeant is a graduate student at the University
of Virginia.