Dick and Joe  

I HOLD WITH THOSE (probably our ranks have grown since the Call election) who insist that Vice President Richard Nixon, may be a far greater danger to the Republic than Joe McCarthy. The recent campaign seems to bear this out. …



Reflections in Mid-Winter  

Imagination always lags behind intellect. We know that it is now possible for the whole world to be blown up by hydrogen bombs, yet we cannot really employ this knowledge: it does not come to us as a living image. …



A. A. Berle and the Corporate Soul  

THE 20TH CENTURY CAPITALIST REVOLUTION, by Adolph A. Berle, Jr. Harcourt, Brace and Co., N. Y. 192 pages. $3.00. The place of monopoly in the modern world was highlighted some twenty years ago when Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means published …



Did Anyone Say “War Prosperity?”  

OUR ELECTIONS ARE NOTABLE for verbiage. But now that the air has been cleared of campaign oratory, what emerges is that only one issue aroused wide-spread interest-prosperity, i.e., full production and full employment. The recent election made it clear that by …



A Report on Asian Socialism  

Socialism in Asia emerged after, rather than before, Communism. The fact may seem trivial, but it has a decided significance. For while Communism was a transplantation from Europe, carefully nurtured by Lenin, Socialism evolved as part of the normal process …





Letter from Algeria  

When Lord Acton declared that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, he may not have been thinking of the slave economy of 18th-century plantations, nor of the kind of peonage that much of 19th-century colonialism still implied. But his …





The Hollywood Imagination  

The following item is reprinted, with permission, from the English monthly Twentieth Century, where it appeared as a note by its editor. We think it an interesting comment on an aspect of American life as seen by an English observer.-Ed. …



The Shame of U.S. Liberalism  

. . . Never before had the fact of being an American brought one so close to humiliation. The sight of Washington in August was enough to make one cringe, so enormous was the upsurge of elemental stupidity and reasonless …



Guatemala and American Politics  

It is possible that by the time this issue of DISSENT appears, the problem of Guatemala will have been forgotten, pushed aside by some new catastrophe. But forgotten, we are convinced, only for the moment. What happened there is so …



Sects and Sectarians  

I. The Sociology of the Sect A sect, as the Latin etymology suggests, consists of men who have cut themselves off from the main body of society. They have formed a restricted and closed group which rejects the norms of …



Indo-China: End of an Epoch  

The Geneva agreement which brought the fighting in Indo-China to an end wrote finis to the French Empire in Asia. France is the last of the European powers to have been driven out of Asia, and with its defeat a …





Correspondence  

Editors: David Sachs’ article “On Ends Justifying Means” (DISSENT No. 2) seems to me to have treated too lightly certain ethical questions which have long been a source of division in radical movements. Western Socialism has been characterized by a …