Paul Goodman’s Community of Scholars  

Like Dr. Johnson, Paul Goodman loves the University of Salamancha. He admires the strong sense of corporate responsibility and independence among those old Dominicans who spoke with one voice against the most powerful government of their time. He guesses that …



The College as Rat-Race  

In 1950, 2,214,000 students were enrolled in American colleges and universities. By 1960 the total had grown to 3,570,000 and in the last academic year it was 4,207,000. Projections for 1970 range as high as seven million. This increase is …



Black Boys and Native Sons  

James Baldwin first came to the notice of the American literary public not through his own fiction but as author of an impassioned criticism of the conventional Negro novel. In 1949 he published in Partisan Review an essay called “Everybody’s …



Letters  

Editors: I read with great interest Lewis Coser’s article “The Hungarian Revolution Revisited,” [Summer, 1963], in which he wrote (referring to the beginning of the revolutionary movement in Budapest in October, 1956): “Nobody in the West, certainly, had any inkling …



In Defense of Spying  

Before World War II arms control agreements never involved national or international inspection systems; the great powers relied upon their own intelligence agencies to detect violations. That old method has a certain appeal: spies instead of inspectors. And Allen Dulles …



A Visit to Jackson, Mississippi  

This summer, with my family on a camping trip, I passed briefly through Jackson, Mississippi. I don’t want to write my impressions of that unhappy town, but to limit myself to telling of our meeting with Charles Butts, the young …



A Case Poorly Made  

The author of this book has a case to make. He argues that the “Palmer raids” and the Red scare of 1919-20 were not an aberration due to World War I and the Russian revolution. Rather, these events stimulated the …



Academic Gamesmanship and the Realities of War  

Among all the spurious “sciences” that have grown up around the notion that to abstract one’s propositions from reality is to be truly “scientific,” most pernicious has been the new “science” of strategy. Armed by their supposed knowledge of game …



Democracy and Dictatorship in Modern Africa  

The people of the emerging nations, as Stanley Diamond has rightly said (“Modern Africa: the Pains of Independence,” DISSENT, Spring 1963), need our “humane insight, fraternal sympathy, and concrete historical perceptions.” They also have a right to constructive criticism. To …



Our Men in Honduras  

Liberals like to regard the Alliance for Progress as a bold, even revolutionary conception. In practice, as in Honduras, it has become something very different, so different that we may speak of two Alliances for Progress. The first envisions the …



Further Autopsies on the Market System  

The siege against the market system, or more accurately, against its sustaining folklore, grows stronger, “end of ideology” or not. With the appearance of David BazeIon’s The Paper Economy (Random House; $6.95), it undergoes an assault a notch more devastating …



Black Boys and Native Sons  

James Baldwin first came to the notice of the American literary public not through his own fiction but as author of an impassioned criticism of the conventional Negro novel. In 1949 he published in Partisan Review an essay called “Everybody’s …



Hannah Arendt: The Clothes of the Empress  

The debate sparked by Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is almost as disturbing as the book itself. A good many qualified reviewers in various journals have attacked not only Miss Arendt’s views but the scholarship on which her conclusions are …



The UAW: Over the Top or Over the Hill?  

In the midst of the great organizing drive of the CIO, which was to culminate in the solid establishment of industrial unionism in the United States, John L. Lewis came to Detroit to address a mass meeting. Some ten thousand …



The Power of the March—and After  

The success of the March on Washington is now a part of American history. But its ramifying effects on the civil rights revolution will be long in unfolding. Certainly the moral impact of the March was incalculable. As one of …