Mitchell Cohen is an author, essayist and critic, He is professor of political science at Baruch College of the City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. From 1991 to 2009, he was co-editor of Dissent, one of the United States' leading intellectual quarterlies. He is now an Editor Emeritus. Biography Born in New York City in 1952, he received his doctorate from Columbia University. While in high school he volunteered for the Eugene McCarthy for President campaign (1968), the Norman Mailer-Jimmy Breslin primary campaign (1969) and the Paul O’Dwyer for Senate campaign (1970). Cohen did undergraduate studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Work Cohen's articles and books treat diverse themes ranging from social democratic theory and the idea of cosmopolitanism to the relation between political ideas and culture, especially opera. He defines himself as a “social democratic” humanist or a “liberal socialist” and coined the term “rooted cosmopolitanism” to describe how a citizen can be linked to his or her own society while also being a universalist. His essay “Why Lenin’s Critics were Right” (Dissent, Fall 2017), defended left-wing critics of Bolshevism. Cohen covered the revolutions of 1989 on the ground in East Berlin and Budapest for Dissent. He has guest lectured at numerous European and American universities, was National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and a visiting professor at Stanford. He was CUNY Writing Fellow at the Levy Biography Center. He was American “Correspondent” of Raisons politiques and is a member of the editorial boards of Jewish Social Studies and Israel Studies Review. His articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications and languages including the Times Literary Supplement, Les Temps Modernes, Musik & Aesthetik, Nexus, and the New York Times Book Review. His book The Wager of Lucien Goldmann is a sympathetic study of the thought of a Romanian-French Marxist humanist intellectual. His book Zion and State examines the origins of the conflict between the left and right in Israel, focusing especially on the question of whether a state is a means or an end in itself. Cohen's book The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (Princeton, 2017, paperback, 2020) is a study of the relation between political ideas and opera from the birth of opera, circa 1600, through the French Revolution, focusing on Florence, Mantua, Venice,