The Dignity of All People.

"Socialism is the name of our desire," Dissent's founders stated in 1954. It was an ethical and moral demand, a compass rather than a map. It was a "vision," they wrote, "that gives urgency to... criticism of the human condition in our time." One purpose for Dissent was to rescue the idea of socialism from those who claimed it for authoritarian ends. And that points to a problem with our vocabulary. Across the globe, a few big concepts define political orientations: liberalism, socialism, capitalism. But each of these categories contains multiple meanings, including internally contradictory ones. There are struggles between ideological camps, of course, but there are also struggles within them over how to define these categories for the public. The ways that people understand the meaning of political words is, alas, derived less from the work of intellectual magazines and more from experiences with politicians who claim them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]