The Best of The Nation

July 2000     ISBN: 1560252677

From the Editors

When we sat down to select the pieces to appear in this anthology, we gave ourselves four guidelines.

� First, they should indeed be the best of The Nation.
� Second, they should reflect the spirit of The Nation, which is, to quote the words of its founding prospectus, "the critical spirit."
� Third, there should be no more than one article from any single writer.
� And finally, they should en masse give the reader a sense of the diverse political, cultural, literary, and ideological perspectives that have found a home in our pages.

What we ended up with, however, was something unplanned: An alternative history of the last decade of the twentieth century, a unique archive of the issues, values, institutions, and personalities which preoccupied, united and divided, and ultimately defined the independent, democratic left. Which is not to say that there is or was one left any more than there is or was a party-line from which contributors to this somewhat fractious, elegant, quirky, searching journal have never deviated or have even measured themselves against.

Thus Katha Pollitt on the arguments over the literary canon and Gore Vidal on the patriarchal state are light years apart in sensibility, style, and priorities, yet they share originality of conception, independence of thought, and a standard of literary excellence which should be model to any student of the culture. Although the articles and reviews and poetry pieces assembled here cover the last ten years, contributors to the anthology roam far and wide--to the distant past and the unknown future. Marshall Berman's meditation on the Communist Manifesto is an illustration of the former, and Mark Crispin Miller's chart depicting the New Entertainment State of the latter. We go to press in the midst of an unprecedented and overwhelming cascade of mergers, takeovers, consolidations in the communications biz.

How sweet it is to be an island of independence in the midst of this ocean of absentee conglomerated ownership. We would be the last to insist that editorial (and/or business) independence guarantee either literary quality or political integrity. But we suspect that the creative context made possible by The Nation's 135-year history of independent publishing, so felicitously captured by Gore Vidal in his introduction, helps account for whatever originality of conception, innocence of assumption, lyricism of spirit, skepticism of the official line, and clarity of thought the reader might find in the pages ahead. Read on!