In the time of the war lords and of the Koumintang, it was not so hard for leftists, even Stalinists, to write something readable about China. Your leftist went there in person, and afterwards reported frankly what he had seen …
The contempt frequently expressed by many economists toward Karl Marx first began to dissolve when the growth of monopoly and the possibility of such disturbing phenomena as unemployment became genuine realities. More and more, social scientists came to agree that …
The events which follow took place between the months of June and December, 1956. The battalion to which I belonged was principally composed of young draftees, led by regular army officers and non-commissioned officers who had all had a year …
Editors: In the last issue of DISSENT you carry a review of Nkrumah’s Ghana by M. K. Kamath. The author of this review implies that Nkrumah alone freed Ghana and created the “Secret Circle” and the Convention People’s Party. The …
How far are the political decisions of the Soviet leaders influenced by their belief in an official ideology—and how far are they empirical responses to objective conflcts of interest, to real situations of power, which are only expressed in ideological …
Dear Nick: When I read your piece in Partisan Review [Winter 1958] on Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago I was struck by your enthusiasm for the novel (I had not yet read it), and puzzled by the fact that your very great …
ALGERIA: THE REALITIES, by Germaine Tillion. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1958. Germaine Tillion’s Algeria is a beautifully written, but seriously flawed, book. The author, an ethnologist and a leading French authority on the sociology of Algeria, has put together …
The Chinese “100 Flowers” or “rectification” episode— heralded as an Asian “thaw” when it was first announced in early 1957 —ended this winter with the fourth of the great purges which the Communist regime has conducted since coming to power …
MANY of us have been quite concerned about the financial status of college teachers, and the fact that non-academic commissions have been formed to investigate conditions and that citizens committees have been busily examining data with the apparent intention of …
“MANY a traveler has wondered why the Wameriku habitually sacrifice their lives to their curious ideas on traffic and mobility. As is well known, thousands yearly suffer death on the roads for no other reason than an apparent compulsion to …
February 7, 1935 The diary is not a literary form I am especially fond of; at the moment I would prefer the daily newspaper. But there is none available. … Cut off from political action, I am obliged to resort …
Bergson once wrote about the man who, when asked why he didn’t weep at a sermon which reduced everyone else to tears, replied: “I don’t belong to the parish.” Bergson felt that what that man had said of tears was …
Much of the potency of contemporary attacks on socialism lies not in the points they score against Marx’s ideas—since these points when valid could be made equally well, and often have been, by Marxists themselves—but in the fact that all …
Evidence of rather widespread disaffection or at least dissatisfaction among Russian writers has been frequently reported in recent years. We have heard of a number of attempts of Russian novelists, playwrights and critics to express in more or less veiled …
