Spring 2024

Though written independently of each other, and obviously not intended as a debate between the authors, the two articles that follow may be said to represent opposing views of the Egyptian, or…

In no sense do these notes pretend to the blessed adjective “definitive.” They are based on impressions derived from observations, conversations, interviews, meetings, and a little reading…

The main question Mr. Rogow* sets out to answer is whether the British Labor Party, when in power, was able to influence significantly the structure, psychology, and objectives of British…

The eternalization of the present is a recurrent characteristic of conservative thought: the insistence that what is exhausts what can be. It is striking that this notion should…

The article that appears below is taken from a forthcoming book entitled The Philosophy of Art History, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf in the fall of 1958. It forms part of a chapter…

Les Juifs Ne Savent Pas S’Orga’niser En Collectivitd. (The Jews Do Not Know How to Organize Themselves Collectively.) So ran the headline over an interview by Nikita Khrushchev to Le…

The interesting thing about this recession is that signs of it were visible as far back as two years ago. One indication of economic malaise was an enormous credit expansion accompanied,…

After a brief period of excitement over fascism and Bonapartism in France, American liberals have returned to their cherished complacency by observing that nothing has really changed in that…

For months, it is now clear, there had been a conspiracy to overthrow the French republic. Organized by extreme rightists and semi-fascists in France and Algeria, this conspiracy soon entangled…

THE REVOLUTIONARY THEORIES OF Louis AUGUSTE BLANQUI, by Allan B. Spitzer. Columbia Univ. Press, 1957. This is a painstaking, if somewhat pedestrian, study of the theories of the “first professional revolutionary” of Europe. Blanqui spent forty of his seventy-six years …

The celebrated episode of the trip of the `Bolshevik leaders” across Germany within a “sealed train” has caused as much ink to run as the accusation of being in the pay of the Kaiser, examined below. But the episode is …

After a decade of injustice, the Attorney General of the United States casually removed the Independent Socialist League from his List of Subversive Organizations a month or so ago. In announcing the decision, no reference was made to the merits …

The end result of Henry Pachter’s contribution to DISSENT’S discussion of contemporary foreign policy [Spring, 1958] is to compound the confusion of an already chaotic situation. George Orwell once observed that the English language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our …

ORIENTAL DESPOTISM, by Karl August Wittfogel. Yale University Press, 1957 In calling his book “a comparative study of total power,” the author is doing himself justice, for the book indeed is an immense file case of characteristics which at various …

When I came back to New York last fall, just in time for the Sputnik, after a year in London and two months in Tuscany, I felt I had crossed a boundary much wider than the Atlantic. We are an …