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 …
In the postwar era, philosophy in West Germany has mainly been considering the relative merits of Heidegger, Husserl and Kant. As in America, outside the polarity of existentialism and positivism, little has come along to excite either students or scholars. …
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 …
Among professional political scientists the late Franz Neumann easily took a position hors cadre. In a drab trade he excelled in brilliance. Among circumspect searchers of validated facts he stood out as a man of ideas and an author of …
Writers on the problem of ideology frequently describe it as an expression of a group or class view which gives the individual both an awareness and rationalization of his particular social role. Developing complex ideological systems along these lines was …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 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 …
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 …
All politicians these days run for office scared. It’s harder and harder to get elected. But now we have the sight of a politician “running scared” for nomination to office! And three years to go!
I think it is altogether appropriate, and to me welcome, that Irving Howe has stated his views on “American Forum” frankly, openly and without equivocation. It is doubly welcome that he also writes “without rancor” and without ruling people like …
The editors of DISSENT have, for the most part, had little concern with the parochial quarrels, maneuvers and synthetic “activity” which characterize the life of the few remaining radical groups in America. Our interests have usually been elsewhere; our ideas …
So you have decided to leave the party. And you have written to tell me about it. What should I answer?
