Spring 2024

The editors of DISSENT are pleased to print the first English translation of this remarkable philosophical and social essay by the distinguished young Polish writer, Leszek Kolakowski, whose…

Milovan Djilas is in jail once more, this time because he has published, during the era of deStalinization, a book with unflattering recollections of Stalin. As he himself remarks, there is little new in what he says. Anyone who remembers …

Our fact-oriented Administration might consider the folIowing facts in evaluating its interventionist policy in South East Asia (Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand): • Since 1954 we have spent over $2.5 billion (by the end of this year it will be $3 …

As there are at least twelve different questions raised by this symposium, all to be answered in four or five pages, I have decided to limit myself to a few ideas. Roughly, there are two separate themes posed—the individual’s private …

Since the Second World War the American radical has had the unenviable task of having to advocate socialism in the midst of capitalist plenty. So unrewarding have been his efforts that nowadays he hardly talks about socialism at all, but …

1) The term “radical” as most of today’s young radicals apply it to themselves is adequately defined by any standard dictionary— going to the roots of social problems, demanding a change in the very nature of existing society. However, in …

1.) I am a radical because as a child I found myself in a world of lies. The three lies which, put together, make the biggest lie, are the lies of sex, money and authority. We were taught by conscious …

1.) The radical tradition has left us three things worth preserving. First, a complex of values related to the ideal of a democratic community of free and equal individuals. These values are by no means the exclusive property of the …

Dear Plastrik: Thank you for your cable of 19th inst. I find it difficult to understand what the dismay is about. Goa, Diu and Daman were three Portuguese possessions in India. After the British and the French left from India, …

A few hundred years from now (if there are any human beings left), historians will look back on the time we live in and call it the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. I believe this transition is the …

What makes me identify as a radical is the conviction that something new must be added to the American calculus of goods and bads, rights and wrongs. I have an uneasy sense of a whole nation skating lightly over a …

Editors: I had planned to let my subscription expire, but your Winter issue was so good that I changed my mind. I was particularly interested in the correspondence between Irving Howe and Paul Goodman on the family. Apparently both men …

MCGRAW-HILL ENCYCLOPEDIA of RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION, edited by Michael T. Florinsky. New York: A Donat Publication. McGraw-Hill. Illus., maps. xiv + 624 pp. With this new Encyclopedia at hand, it seems inconceivable that we had to make-do without …

MARX’S CONCEPT OF MAN, by Erich Fromm (with a translation from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by T. B. Bottomore). Frederick Ungar, New York, 1961. 260 pp. Hearing the old Lutheran chorals in a Bach oratorio, one is astonished to …