The Mindless Typewriter If Dwight Macdonald’s “America!—Americal” [DISSENT, Fall 1958] were read by the European audience for whom it was intended, would it satisfy their curiosity about this strange land? What European needs to be told that there is a …
Preliminary Remarks This article was written more than a year ago upon the suggestion of one of the editors of Commentary. It was a topical article whose publication was delayed for months because of the controversial nature of my reflections …
Editors: Have you read Galbraith’s Affluent Society? I don’t know what your plans are for dealing with it in DISSENT, [see p. 84] but I do know that it strikes me as a piece of wrong-headed smugness which deserves the …
INCREASED agitation this year by those devoted to pacifism or to racial equality often resulted in civil disturbance. Planned demonstrations sometimes were, and frequently bordered upon, vioIations of local or federal laws. More common still was the jarring of mass …
A new type of political leader has developed in the last few decades. He is a figure both fascinating and ominous, at times attractive for his raw vigor and at other times frightening in his distance from modern assumptions. We …
What shall we call the new Pope when he dies? That will be something of a problem, since the recently-deceased Pius XII was so regularly hailed as “the greatest” in the American press. Harry Truman at least tried to qualify …
SOVIET MARXISM: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS, by Herbert Marcuse Columbia University Press, New York 1958. History written from the viewpoint of victorious politicians and generals always carries the onus of apology: apology for the present rulers who are the heirs of …
THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. 1958. J. K. Galbraith, the well-known Harvard professor, has worked out a plan for a socialist society. I don’t mean to frighten him or some of his faithful readers. (I …
“A Society that can afford atomic bombs can afford some good psychiatry,” say the authors in their conclusions to this book, after documenting in impressive detail that at present American society provides scandalously poor psychiatric care to the majority of …
Our society prides itself on the fact that the concentration camp remains a thing apart, a distinctive feature of totalitarian society. We have prisons, of course, but the prisoner is usually protected from starvation, unrestrained brutality, and pitiless economic exploitation. …
In the nineteenth century the academic man was shielded, at least in part, from the general transformation of labor into a commodity. In our own time, as professors Caplow and McGee demonstrate in their valuable and informative study, the academician …
At first one thinks, this is a horrible joke. Could such an article have been written by Hannah Arendt, the author of the book on totalitarianism? So one then looks for the obvious clues one has missed, the clues which …
Dear Lionel, I think that Doctor Zhivago is one of the most beautiful novels written since Proust, if not the most beautiful. I don’t see, in fact, what other contemporary novelist, with the possible exception of Faulkner, can be compared …
Of all the puzzles which a puzzled Eisenhower-Dulles administration has failed to solve, one of the most important is the proper relationship between military power and foreign policy. It is a difficult problem to grasp, let alone solve, and for …
