Only an extraordinarily prescient observer could have predicted the revival of the American pacifist movement in the fifties. Shattered by the international crisis of the late thirties, pacifism had become by 1941 an intellectually bankrupt, morally compromised appendage to America …
1. Disillusionment with the idea of revolution is one of the most interesting features of American intellectual life today. Since revolution was never a practical possibility in America, this disillusionment might seem as unimportant as the enthusiasm preceding it. What …
The essay which follows was written in the Soviet Union and sent by its author through friends to Paris, asking that it be published. It came out first in 1959, in a French translation, in the Paris monthly Esprit. We …
One fourth of the American people is poor or lives at the margin of poverty. The poverty from which they suffer is not a “case” problem, amenable to solution by social work, nor does it occur merely in “pockets” which …
Scarcely twenty years ago the capitalist system was, to all appearances, disintegrating—in England its symbol was Jarrow, “the town that was murdered,” its representative figure Montagu Norman, the sinister governor of the Bank of England who engineered the rise of …
Mid-Twentieth Century America is an amazingly prosperous land—indeed, the wealthiest nation in the world. Yet in the midst of great plenty are two million people comparable in their destitution to feudal serfs, save that they are bound to no land. …
Editors: It is hard to believe that a more incorrect impression as to the state of opinion in the British Labor Party could be created than that produced by Stanley Plastrik in the Winter 1960 DISSENT. Nationalization is presented as …
PEACETIME SPYING is politically hazardous. It affects national attitudes in much the same way that the peeping tom affects the neighborhood. Invasions of privacy prompt indignation. They make for anger and desperate unreasonableness. That is why the big blunder with …
TUESDAY, May 3rd, was one of those lovely Spring days in New York: the Yanks were playing Detroit and the trees in City Hall Park were putting out new leaves. Yet before the day was over, Civil Defense officials were …
CRUSADER WITHOUT VIOLENCE, by L. D. Reddick. Harper. This book, by an occasional contributor to DISSENT, is a biography of Martin Luther King, the Negro minister who led the bus boycott in Montgomery and has since become one of the …
THE ECLIPSE OF COMMUNITY, by Maurice R. Stein. Princeton University Press. 1960. The Eclipse of Community is a reasoned manual of important American community studies of the past fifty years. One of its great merits is how it implicitly tells …
THE POLITICS OF MASS SOCIETY, by William Kornhauser. Free Press. 1959. Of all the words employed by Socialists, Sociologists, Liberals, Political Scientists, Writers and Literary Critics, none has been so abused as the word “mass.” Whether it has been applied …
Anything as bad a TV must be susceptible to some improvement, but the one sure way of not getting it is to make the programs more “cultural.” The TV chains and the FCC are momentarily nervous, and so they chatter …
An editorial in the April, 1960 issue of Socialist Comentary begins as follows: It would be stupid to deny that demoralization has overtaken the Labor Party since the election. What could be more depressing than the contrast between the position …
