In the Autumn 1957 DISSENT, Henri Rabasseire continued his attack on the Protestant work ethic which he had started with his fine piece “The Right to be Lazy” in Winter 1956. I am in full agreement with him that it …
The time has come to relax. Sex is here to stay. The age of pioneers is past. The frontier is homesteaded by the suitcase farmers; main street is lined with porcelain fronted stores. Now safely in the hands of the …
Within recent months the Leopold-Loeb murder case has served as the theme of a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, novels by Meyer Levin, James Yaffe and MaryCarter Roberts, a paperback case history, and a Broadway dramatization of Mr. Levin’s most successful …
Now can life become essential? How can value become reality and meaning be made effective? Around these questions the lifework of George Lukacs is centered. The paradox of his development is that he found the lost “homeland” in Stalinism and …
One advantage of living in a nation like Britain is that it occasionally produces a point of view that has not occurred to Americans. The current discussion in America on mass culture has been concerned mainly with its effect on …
A great deal of fuss is being made over the discovery, in England, of a group of angry young men. The title, thank heavens, is not a self-designation; it is a free gift of the week-end reviewers. Even the New …
There can be no doubt that the mandarins, whose authority derived from the acquisition of knowledge, were the country’s only wielders of power, nor that as a class they were firmly opposed to technical progress and social change. Thus, if …
“What has changed in Poland since October? Gomulka has changed.” This joke, circulating in Warsaw a year and a half after the Polish “spring in October,” is characteristic of the current mood of disenchantment. Polish intellectuals who were in the …
Omnivorousness is perhaps the most striking quality of corporate civilization. Every idea, like every thing and no matter what its origins, is swallowed, absorbed and reused. This condition was brought home to me recently by an acquaintance of mine who …
French public opinion, kept in ignorance of the true state of affairs by design and deceit, does not yet understand that the Sakiet bombing marks a decisive turn in the Algerian war. We have constantly maintained that a military Dien …
Can there be a “foreign policy” for socialists? In a world not of their making or choice, have socialists anything to offer but a moral stance? Against the harsh realities of world politics, morality might seem to be the least …
Once upon a time there was a myth named le proletariat. Though obviously a male, the myth was believed to be pregnant with child— a well conformed socialistic baby true to the Scriptures. Baby being long overdue, the congregation of …
It is a bitter fact concerning our time that a scientific development so remarkable as the launching of sputnik should have evoked responses of fear and dread. Let us be candid: these were responses shared by all honest and sensitive …
Suppose one were to pose the question: why is anxiety so endemic to our current national life? The most likely response would be a supercilious shrug: naturally, anxiety must be the common state of those who have lived through upheaval, …
In his review of Milovan Djilas’ New Class, [DISSENT, Fall 1957] Norman Thomas necessarily had to stress the general and very powerful job of debunking which this book has performed. But there is one problem touched upon by Djilas which …
