Recently, a newspaperwoman said to me: “When I am in England I feel like a Conservative, in Italy I feel like a Socialist, in India I feel like a Communist.” When asked what she meant by this, she explained that …
Americans for Democratic Action would be a vastly improved organization if it would do two things. The first would be to unfrock the Hon. Hubert Humphrey as its vice chairman. The second would be to give its annual award this …
The past ten years have not been easy for democratic socialist theoreticians. Their economic models, so long shielded from the rough winds of reality, were put to a decisive test during the tenure of the British Labour Government and found …
If there is one lesson to be learned from the Malenkov “resignation,” it is that most of the journalistic guesses about the specific power relations in the Kremlin are utterly fruitless. No one really knows. And if the subject were …
The American Dream enjoins limitless social mobility. Class barriers don’t exist for it, or if they do they are so fluid as to be virtually without meaning. “From each according to his abilities … ” could really stand as its …
Surely the most curious paradox in recent U.S. history is the breakdown of caste relations between the races. It is curious because it is occurring under official auspices—under the sponsorship of a government not noted, at least in recent years, …
Now does it happen that the masses sell their souls to leaders and follow them blindly? On what does the power of attraction of leaders over masses rest? What are the historical situations in which this identification of leader and …
In a footnote to his essay “Sects and Sectarians” (DISSENT, Autumn, 1954), Lewis Coser advises that he is employing a “typological procedure,” and that the political sect modeled in his study is a sociological construct, neither portraying in its entirety …
THIRTY YEARS AGO WALTER LIPPMAN had already noted that the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements and that a revolution was taking place in the techniques of this manufacture. By now the techniques for creating consent have been …
Geltman’s and Plastrik’s critique of my essay seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding of what a typological procedure aims to accomplish. Social scientists can use concepts which are closely geared to the empirical and historical reality at …
The Federation of Atomic Scientists has issued an appeal to the United Nations to investigate the danger that continued test explosions of the hydrogen bomb may result in unpredictable genetic damage to the human race. This appeal, which has been …
That the American Committee for Cultural Freedom is a grouping of some significance in our intellectual life, is not to be disputed. Its well-publicized statements are often taken as the quasi-official opinion of intellectual liberalism. It counts among its members, …
The literary reputation of Theodore Dreiser has suffered a slow but steady decline in recent years, curiously paralleling the decline of radical sentiment among American intellectuals. One of the critics who has been most effective in depreciating Dreiser has been …
By one of those neat coincidences that sometimes illuminate political life, former Senator Harry Cain launched a powerful criticism of the government’s “security” program at the very moment the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) was opening its recent convention in …
As this is being written, Bonn’s parliament is voting for German rearmament. This caps the policy of “restoration” pursued during recent years by the U.S. in Western Europe; at the same time it introduces additional elements of rigidity not merely …
