Today, anxiety is a first principle of social life, and the right knows how to exploit it. Capital foments the insecurity that impels people to submit to its demands. And yet there are more Americans than ever before who have tasted certain kinds of social freedoms and, whether they admit it or not, don't want to give them up or deny them to others. From Bill Clinton's impeachment to the Terri Schiavo case, the public has resisted the right wing's efforts to close the deal on the culture. Not coincidentally, the cultural debates, however attenuated, still conjure the ghosts of utopia by raising issues of personal autonomy, power, and the right to enjoy rather than slog through life. In telling contrast, the contemporary left has not posed class questions in these terms; on the contrary, it has ceded the language of freedom and pleasure, 'opportunity' and 'ownership,' to the libertarian right.

It's not only corruption that distorts the utopian impulse when it begins to take some specific social shape. The prospect of more freedom stirs anxiety. We wa…

The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been…

Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be represented in p…

The notion that there might be any need for, or possibility of, profound changes in the institutions that shape American life work, family, technology, the pri…

It's not only corruption that distorts the utopian impulse when it begins to take some specific social shape. The prospect of more freedom stirs anxiety. We wa…

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable,…