Notebook: Letter From Australia  

In Australia no less than in other Western nations, radicalism took a beating from the apathy of the fifties. The rot set in after the fall of Prime Minister Chifley’s Labor Government in 1949. It was stayed briefly by the …



Notebook: Managers And Machines  

The threat of cybernetics to jobs has been apparent for some time; not only factory-workers and clerks are affected, but also the “middle managers” (cf. Irving Howe’s “Cybernation: the Trauma that Awaits Us,” Dissent, Spring, 1962). Computers do indeed make …



Notebook: Does Public Ownership Still Matter?  

Anthony Crosland is the ablest and most persuasive spokesman of the British Labor party’s “New Right,” notably that section of it which is also pro-European and skeptical of what Mr. Gaitskell on a recent occasion described as “an independent foreign …



The Image Of The Adolescent Minority  

In our society there are two kinds of minority status. One of these I will call the “hot-blooded” minorities, whose archetypical image is that of the Negro or Latin. In the United States, “Teen-agers” are treated as a “hot-blooded” minority. …



The New Peace Movement Part II  

As nuclear energy and rockets are again revealing, science itself is intrinsically more revolutionary than any ideology or political or social movement. Merely trying to adjust to new scientific and technological discoveries imposes a perpetual revolution on modern societies. (Consider, …



Gaullism And The “Machiavellian Left”  

On February 15,1963 the arrest of several army officers and their accomplices aborted a new attempt on the life of General de Gaulle; the eighth such attempt since he took power on May 14, 1958. Go back to the remotest …







A Revival Of Radicalism?  

How many readers can recall the intellectual atmosphere in this country at the time Dissent started publishing, almost a decade ago? It was a moment of retreat, even rout. A good many intellectuals formerly of the left were engaged in …



On David Siqueiros: A Dilemma For Artists  

I have been asked several times during the last years to sign a statement requesting the Mexican government to release the painter Siqueiros from prison. He has been sentenced for a long term because he led a violent demonstration against …



En Route to Victory  

Jim Peck is one of those remarkable men who make us all feel a little more human and dignified. Like his colleagues in CORE, he didn’t need the bona fides of 53 stitches in his head, earned on a Freedom …



The Wounds of Hiroshima  

Claude Eatherly, as too few Americans yet know, is the pilot who led the bombing mission which dropped the first atom bomb on mankind over Hiroshima, and the second three days later over Nagasaki. Through acts of repentance, from trying …



Criticism as an Abstract Art  

Harold Rosenberg is a brilliant critic whose most telling perceptions derive more easily from an organizing of ideas than from observation and description. He invented the name “Action Painting” for the currently fashionable American style that began after the war …



The Functions of Art  

Anyone familiar with Professor Lowenthal’s Literature and the Image of Man would not be disposed to postpone for very long the satisfaction of reading a new book of his. The present one breaks a good deal of new ground, especially …



The New Peace Movement – Part I  

Mass warfare developed in the modern world even before mass production or mass literacy. One of the rights won by the French revolution, as it turned out, was the right of everyone to take part in war. The Napoleonic wars …