Early in 1960, when the big price-fixing indictments against General Electric were made, Ralph J. Cordiner, GE board chairman, called the resulting publicity a “blow upon the company’s good name. But this situation will pass,” he added, “as have other …
Most Americans react indignantly when the U.S. is accused of following a path of world conquest. Comparisons with Hitler, with Stalin, and with the imperial machinery of England and France in the nineteenth century are met by shocked outrage. Educated …
The obvious answer is, No of course not. But there are signs and portents. It’s a strange moment. There is a lot of social uproar in the country. With the possible exception of China, no major power in the world …
A generation has elapsed without a general depression in the United States. For six years the economy has not even experienced a recession. Most economists are now quite ready to admit that our kind of economy can avoid depressions permanently …
For a discipline that is a regular target for bad jokes about its jargon, the superficiality of its concepts, and the pseudo-scientific quality of its research techniques, sociology has an astonishingly prominent position in the culture. “Anomie,” “power structure,” “Protestant …
Baran and Sweezy may have felt that in writing Monopoly Capital they were doing for the Space Age what Karl Marx had done for the Textile Age and Lenin for the Steel Age. Let it be said from the outset …
On the eve of India’s recent election (February, 1967) the fourth national election since independence in 1947, the Delhi correspondent of the London Times sent home two alarming dispatches. In one he announced the end of India’s parliamentary democracy, predicting …
Dear Son, Our discussion of the “New Left” started with a rather small event related to the wretched war in Vietnam. Two GIs, captured by the Vietcong, were being released in tribute to the “American peace movement.” At a press …
In view of some very sweeping pronouncements that have been made about the meaning of recent economic reforms in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, it seems appropriate to begin by baldly stating my view as to what these …
Bad books are easily ignored. They may waste an unwary reader’s time, but this is a minor irritant. Really bad books, however, are noxious: they insult the intelligence of readers; they also injure the cause they avowedly seek to promote. …
There is little I see to quarrel with in Irving Howe’s original statement on the CIA and students (March—April DISSENT) or with Lewis Coser’s forceful statement published above. I would only call attention to the disappointing fact that too many …
I. Comment by Philip Green To an observer, the recent controversy over tolerance in the pages of DISSENT has shed more heat than light—chiefly for the reason that the disputants have been talking about different things while seeming to be …
“Have you ever been abroad?” I asked the taxi driver in Budapest. “No,” he replied, “only in Vienna.” The answer was not, apparently, intended as a joke. It reflected something essential in the new East European atmosphere: the recrudescence of …
From opposite sides of the spectrum of American politics, Eisenhower and Rustin suggest the same general theory of moral djugment in wartime. They both suggest that only one judgment is possible. War itself (Rustin is a pacifist) , or some …
I have one major disagreement with Lew Coser’s article: this concerns his firm belief in the long-run ineffectiveness of CIA subversion in the fight against Communism. His example is a democratic union in India struggling against a Maoist union. He …
