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This paper presents an alternative to William Kymlicka’s approach for the integration or accommodation of ethnocultural groups in democratic states. It contends that there are different types of states, and that the differences need to be described before their consequences can be argued. The thicker the ‘national’ culture, the more likely it is that large groups of immigrants will have to be accommodated as national minorities rather than as hyphenated nationals. Or, alternatively, multiculturalism may have to take a more corporatist form when the dominant culture is strongly supported by the state.

Marshall was a good friend over many years—almost half a century; he was a political comrade for all those years; and he was a lovely human being. My wife, Judy, and I knew him first as a very vulnerable young man, a graduate student, miserable in Harvard’s Government Department (as I had been not many years before). When he was especially unhappy, he would visit us and hang out in our house, with our kids. I think that we raised his spirits, and he certainly raised ours. I remember vividly how he dragged us to the first Earth Day celebration in Cambridge, on the banks of the Charles River. Judy and I were skeptical, probably wrongly, but Marshall and our two daughters had a wonderful time. Marshall was in important ways a child of the sixties. Though he hated the way that decade ended, in ultra-left posturing and experiments in violence, he never turned his back on all that had gone before

The rise of a genuinely left Confucianism in China would be a welcome development, but Dan Bell’s account of what this doctrine might look like, and how it is invoked by contemporary “new leftists,” leaves me unpersuaded that it could do the ideological work that China needs today. Bell himself recognizes that it still has to be tested—that is, rigorously applied. Meanwhile, I have three worries. (1) Bell describes left Confucianism as a critical doctrine, but it is only in his last paragraph that he says anything that is seriously, pointedly critical. And he doesn’t describe any significant criticism from contemporary left Confucians. Consider one example: China today is one of the most inegalitarian countries in the world, and the inequality is increasing.

I have never served on a jury, but I have been a potential juror, waiting in the basement of the Trenton courthouse with many others. Four or five times I was called to sit there, for a couple of days or for a week, but never called to serve. Tocqueville claims that it's the actual service, the experience of sitting in judgment, rather than just sitting, which has educational value. I am sure that's true, but my hours of sitting ended in one remarkable educational moment.

I can’t speak for the tens of thousands of people who were hurt very badly by Hurricane Sandy and who are still in need, several months later, of a government that is big, strong, effective, and genuinely committed to the well-being of its citizens. New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, testified to President Barack Obama’s efforts to provide at least the appearance of a government like that and to deliver some of the benefits that such a government can bring. But the truth is that we don’t have a government like that. The government we have hasn’t begun to plan for the effects of climate change, and it isn’t able to deploy enough of the resources—trained men and women, machines, and material goods—that people suddenly without homes or without heat, light, and water desperately need. And there is little prospect, even after Obama’s victory, of a government fully committed to the well-being of its citizens and, first of all, to the most threatened and vulnerable among them.

Now that I am about to become an ordinary Dissent nik, I want to describe how that happened once before—in 1954, when I held the first issue of the magazine in my hands. I grew up in the Popular Front, reading Max Lerner and Izzy (I.F.) Stone in the daily newspaper PM . When I was eleven, I wrote a childish "History of World War Two," which ended "Russia fights not for the lust of conquest, but to end conquest." (I had long forgotten where I got that line until a friend told me: it came from Franklin Roosevelt's address to the nation on D-Day, 1944—but FDR wasn't talking about the Russians.) Paul Robeson's "Ballad for Americans" was my idea of high culture. At thirteen, I was editing and writing a little newsletter for my friends and relatives, called Between the Lines .

Dissent is a magazine for people who worry. So here is something to worry about, highlighted by Barack Obama's inaugural address. I am certainly glad that it was his inauguration, but what he said or, better, didn't say, illustrates one of the central problems of left politics today. We are committed to the struggle for economic equality and to the role of unions in that struggle, and right now that commitment is not a source of political strength, as we once thought it would be.

Responding to the critical assessments of his Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer rethinks the central aspects of the notion of complex equality. He addresses the following issues: the meaning and possibility of complex equality; the centrality of democratic citizenship; the danger of complex inequality; the injustice of current international distributions; the role of ordinary morality in distributive justice; the importance of efficiency; and the need for a historical account of social differentiation and distributive complexity.

Whatever the effects of police repression and freezing weather, I believe that the men and women of the Occupations will still be making themselves heard when you read this. Something new and important has begun in American politics, and we won’t see the end of it soon: a political struggle against the growing inequalities of our common life. Since the inequalities are systemic, the struggle won’t be short or easy. I am not sure what the odds are on winning, but it is enormously heartening that so many people, mostly young people, have at last begun the fight.

At this moment, the outcome of the uprisings across the Arab world is radically uncertain. The massive demonstrations and the early successes in Tunisia and Egypt were exhilarating, and the courage of the Syrian demonstrators is inspiring—even though we know almost nothing about who they are. This is a revolutionary moment in the Middle East, and in most of the countries in upheaval, the rebels seem to be strongly committed to nonviolence and, at least in their public statements, to democracy. But the counterrevolution is close on the heels of the revolution, and no one knows what will happen next.

Comment une armee reguliere, qui agit sur un territoire dont son Etat n’a pas la maitrise, doit-elle traiter les populations civiles qui se trouvent sur le terrain d’operation ? Peut-elle privilegier la securite de ses propres soldats ou peut-on plaider, meme dans les actions antiterroristes, pour le maintien de la distinction entre combattants et civils ?

Sometime this summer, if all goes well, the United States will disengage its combat troops from Iraq—and next summer from Afghanistan. In the Dissent/Penn Press book Getting Out , a number of our writers look at historical examples of imperial and postwar exits and discuss the moral criteria for a successful disengagement. One of these is making a best-possible effort to leave behind a decent and effective state. Is the effort we are making in Iraq and Afghanistan the best we could possibly make? There have been so many misjudgments and mistakes in both places, leaving aside the initial decisions to go in (which I would judge differently in the two cases). So, what would a best possible effort look like now?

Quarterlies are often late to cover the politics of the moment, but sometimes we anticipate arguments to come. We carried important articles on torture in the Summer 2003 issue, and we have come back to it again and again in the years since—most recently in an online article by Lillian B. Rubin. We haven't yet discussed the question of how the country as a whole can best acknowledge and repudiate the Bush administration's policy on torture. That administration's more general abuse of executive power is the subject of Sanford Levinson's strong review essay in this issue. Dissent writers have argued about how other countries should reckon with their past; now we have an American reckoning to consider.

The best recent writing, the most illuminating and original writing, on Thomas Hobbes has been the work of philosophers.1 It is a curious sort of work, for philosophers tend to treat Hobbes as if he were a contemporary, a philosopher like themselves, who recently got tenure (at Harvard, say) and then published Leviathan, a very promising but also a very difficult piece of political theory. The text is brilliantly clear in its individual sentences, complex and obscure in its transitions and its larger arguments. The important task, then, is to restate the arguments in as direct and simple a form as possible and to evaluate them: to get the arguments right and to figure out if they are in fact right. Or, to figure out how they are wrong, for one is unlikely to be overly respectful of one’s contemporaries. What is the “logic” and the “anatomy” of Leviathan? How do the arguments work? What are their weak points? On the other hand, philosophers have little interest in the historical Hobbes or in what we might think of as the social meaning of his work, the values he expresses, the tensions he acts out as he writes. They make a clean break with history and historical consciousness, and so they have virtually nothing to say about the question that dominated the work of the immediately preceding generation of scholars, a question usually answered, with large implications, in the affirmative: is Hobbes a bourgeois political theorist?2

On the occasion of the November 2006 annual meeting of the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization (IPSO), we, the members of IPSO's International Scientific Council, noted with considerable satisfaction the receipt of 71 proposals for joint scientific research between Palestinian and Israeli