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 …
In his review of Milovan Djilas’ New Class, [DISSENT, Fall 1957] Norman Thomas necessarily had to stress the general and very powerful job of debunking which this book has performed. But there is one problem touched upon by Djilas which …
Suppose one were to pose the question: why is anxiety so endemic to our current national life? The most likely response would be a supercilious shrug: naturally, anxiety must be the common state of those who have lived through upheaval, …
Probably, we will never he able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. for the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the …
Daniel Bell, the labor editor of Fortune and a former editor of The New Leader, modestly calls his little essay “notes on work … [tied together] by a mood, and some questions.” Indeed, had he elaborated on all the ideas …
A political party, wrote Edmund Burke at the dawn of the nation-state, “is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” This description no …
Having found rather poor enlightenment in the hour-by hour thrillers of Khrushchev’s coup d’etat, we must admit that we prefer historical novelists to Russia experts when it comes to relating who did whom in. But we have been fascinated by …
If I had to select items of twentieth-century evidence to be found one day by future historians and archaeologists, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the protocols of the Moscow trials would be high on my list. Twentieth-century man has …
So great a legion of ideological interests is choking the media of communication of the world today that I deem it advisable to define the terms in which I speak and for whom. In the heated, charged, and violently partisan …
My thesis is that the United States is moving simultaneously toward and away from social equality, and that the tension between the two movements is to a large degree responsible for the present social and political mood. The movement toward …
Writers on the problem of ideology frequently describe it as an expression of a group or class view which gives the individual both an awareness and rationalization of his particular social role. Developing complex ideological systems along these lines was …
Among professional political scientists the late Franz Neumann easily took a position hors cadre. In a drab trade he excelled in brilliance. Among circumspect searchers of validated facts he stood out as a man of ideas and an author of …
The posthumous collection of Franz Neumann’s essays (The Democratic and Authoritarian State, The Free Press, 1957) underlines the tragedy of his death. Some of the essays are diffuse and obscure, others unfinished; and the collection as a whole does not …
