Middle East in Conflict  

This collection of essays and studies on the Middle East was brought together by its editor with a novel purpose in mind. The people of this area of the world are struggling to adjust to new conditions; their loyalties conflict …



How They Destroyed a Myth  

The East Berlin uprising of June 17, 1953 was the first massive challenge totalitarianism met from within. It utterly destroyed the myth of the unity of state and society under Stalinism. Led by the workers, an entire society rose against …



Towards Dynamic Barbarism  

Professor Baran, says the dust jacket, “is probably the only Marxian social scientist teaching at a large American University.” It ain’t necessarily so; but that the Monthly Review editors should believe it is quite revealing. The book purports to be …



Class and State in a Total Society  

Readers of DISSENT are, or should be, already familiar with the thesis of this important book. It is that the Communist revolution has resulted in the total control of the state (which is bigger than society) by the party bureaucracy …



Scientists in the Bureaucratic Age  

A prime factor in the 20th Century Industrial Revolution and the reorganization of society that has accompanied it, science is today itself being reorganized. The rationalists are being rationalized. As science has become more important to industry and government, changes …





Dilemmas of Radicalism  

The posthumous collection of Franz Neumann’s essays (The Democratic and Authoritarian State, The Free Press, 1957) underlines the tragedy of his death. Some of the essays are diffuse and obscure, others unfinished; and the collection as a whole does not …







The Revolt Against Social Equality  

My thesis is that the United States is moving simultaneously toward and away from social equality, and that the tension between the two movements is to a large degree responsible for the present social and political mood. The movement toward …



White Man—Listen!  

So great a legion of ideological interests is choking the media of communication of the world today that I deem it advisable to define the terms in which I speak and for whom. In the heated, charged, and violently partisan …



Our Peculiar Hell  

If I had to select items of twentieth-century evidence to be found one day by future historians and archaeologists, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the protocols of the Moscow trials would be high on my list. Twentieth-century man has …



Mythology and Mechanics of a Coup  

Having found rather poor enlightenment in the hour-by hour thrillers of Khrushchev’s coup d’etat, we must admit that we prefer historical novelists to Russia experts when it comes to relating who did whom in. But we have been fascinated by …



The Court and Civil Liberty  

The June decisions of the Supreme Court were major decisions; this is so even if those to whom the decisions applied directly, or who had initiated the actions that led through the federal courts, have already left the scene. The …



COMMUNICATIONS  

Dissent An American Quarterly Magazine called DISSENT has published a special number about Africa. I dissent emphatically from almost all its judgments about the East and Central African territories, and I should be astonished if that were not the attitude …