About Social Research  *   Order/Subscribe  *  Back Issues  *  Forthcoming Issues 
Masthead  *  Contact  *  Submissions  * Conference series 
Endangered Scholars Worldwide * Journal Donation Project   *   New School for Social Research



WHAT'S LEFT, WHAT'S RIGHT?
Volume 60  No. 3 (Fall 1993)
Arien Mack, Editor

Table of Contents   Notes on Contributors     Ordering information

Editor's Introduction

   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.

Culture Wars

    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.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.

   JEFFREY C. GOLDFARB

 
 

    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).
     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).
 
 

Back to the Top

Table of Contents

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

Back to the Top

Notes on Contributors
(at time of publication)


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.
 
 

Table of Contents  Back to the Top


Home