Role of the Scientists Editors: So much in Edward Speyer’s article, “Scientists in A Bureaucratic Age” [DISSENT, Summer 1957] is merely implied, so many half-truths are only half voiced, that it is difficult to know where to start taking issue. …
French public opinion, kept in ignorance of the true state of affairs by design and deceit, does not yet understand that the Sakiet bombing marks a decisive turn in the Algerian war. We have constantly maintained that a military Dien …
Role of the Scientists Editors: So much in Edward Speyer’s article, “Scientists in A Bureaucratic Age” [DISSENT, Summer 1957] is merely implied, so many half-truths are only half voiced, that it is difficult to know where to start taking issue. …
Omnivorousness is perhaps the most striking quality of corporate civilization. Every idea, like every thing and no matter what its origins, is swallowed, absorbed and reused. This condition was brought home to me recently by an acquaintance of mine who …
Once upon a time there was a myth named le proletariat. Though obviously a male, the myth was believed to be pregnant with child— a well conformed socialistic baby true to the Scriptures. Baby being long overdue, the congregation of …
It is a bitter fact concerning our time that a scientific development so remarkable as the launching of sputnik should have evoked responses of fear and dread. Let us be candid: these were responses shared by all honest and sensitive …
Mass Culture, compiled by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, is the first book that has ever tempted me to apply the reviewer’s cliche, “definitive.” The theoretical, historical, statistical, cultural, anthropological, depth-analytical, polemical, prophetical articles in it on TV, the …
Our concern is not to undertake a theoretical analysis of socialism in the abstract but rather to understand what socialism should be for us, at this time, in our Western civilization. Hence I raise the question: Is socialism primarily the …
Ideas change but their formulas remain. Two people a thousand years apart may be of the same mind though they strove for different things; on the other hand, no bore is more boring than the disciple who quotes what I …
Every political theory which does not recognize the autonomy of politics vis a vis socio-economic history rejects out of hand the following propositions: that the problem of political power in a socialist economy is not fundamentally different from the same …
The boundless power of the party machine over public life is constantly being confirmed; in private conversation and on the printed page we return to this problem in the weary tones of recrimination and impotence. Is there any point, we …
The German election this past fall followed a pattern that had already been set four years earlier. Then, as now, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) entered a national election with some reason for hope. During the last four years it …
In the last year or so, theory has become news. The debate over the character of the changes taking place in Russian society has been carried on, not merely by a few radical intellectuals, but by government officials, newspapermen, indeed …
Each generation sees history through lenses ground by its own experience. In these days of recoil from radical involvement it is hardly surprising that reinterpretations of just those phases of Western history in which the radical impulse was strongest have …
THE MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST, by Dwight Macdonald. Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy This book, as a book, doesn’t add much to the wealth of nations. It is foolishly inconsistent, not often thought-provoking, not informative (except perhaps to the young who …
