A new type of political leader has developed in the last few decades. He is a figure both fascinating and ominous, at times attractive for his raw vigor and at other times frightening in his distance from modern assumptions. We …
INCREASED agitation this year by those devoted to pacifism or to racial equality often resulted in civil disturbance. Planned demonstrations sometimes were, and frequently bordered upon, vioIations of local or federal laws. More common still was the jarring of mass …
Editors: Have you read Galbraith’s Affluent Society? I don’t know what your plans are for dealing with it in DISSENT, [see p. 84] but I do know that it strikes me as a piece of wrong-headed smugness which deserves the …
The economy, like any organism, can absorb only so many minor injuries before the cumulative impact begins to undermine the economic health of the nation. Builtin stabilizers of unemployment compensation, social security, and the like may pull the economy out …
The general consensus that there has been a significant change in political mood, a shift toward liberalism, seems correct. It is, of course, extremely welcome, offering new possibilities for people of our persuasion; though we should take care to make …
Let me go directly to the heart of the matter: at present, there is no more politics in France. No more politics, that is, if we mean by politics a reasonable calculation of the balance of those forces able to …
JULY 14, 1959 Now that it is all over it is easy to think back and realize that today’s events had been well prefigured, even before the Soviet launching of Sputnik I in October of 1957. I remember having read …
Of all the puzzles which a puzzled Eisenhower-Dulles administration has failed to solve, one of the most important is the proper relationship between military power and foreign policy. It is a difficult problem to grasp, let alone solve, and for …
Dear Lionel, I think that Doctor Zhivago is one of the most beautiful novels written since Proust, if not the most beautiful. I don’t see, in fact, what other contemporary novelist, with the possible exception of Faulkner, can be compared …
At first one thinks, this is a horrible joke. Could such an article have been written by Hannah Arendt, the author of the book on totalitarianism? So one then looks for the obvious clues one has missed, the clues which …
In the nineteenth century the academic man was shielded, at least in part, from the general transformation of labor into a commodity. In our own time, as professors Caplow and McGee demonstrate in their valuable and informative study, the academician …
AMERICA AS A CIVILIZATION, by Max Lerner. Simon & Schuster, 1036 pp. $10. This book is disappointingly bland and inconclusive, an exhaustive balance sheet of American assets and…
THE QUESTION, by Henri Alleg. Introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated from the French by John Calder. New York, George Braziller, Inc. 123 pp. $2.95. As one among many thousands, Henri…
On March 6, 1957, the former colony of the Gold Coast became an independent nation within the British Commonwealth and took the name of Ghana, thereby recalling a West African empire of…
