IT IS A WELL-ESTABLISHED axiom that a state must jealously guard itself against the large-scale disaffection of its citizens. Those whose personal convictions have prevented them from adequately fulfilling their obligations to the state have often been punished as an …
In January 1953, Asoka Mehta, one of the leaders of the Indian Praja Socialist Party, published a pamphlet—really a little book—entitled Socialism and Peasantry. In this study Mehta tried to find an answer to the most difficult and …
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 …
POLITICS, ECONOMICS AND WELFARE: PLANNING AND POLITICOECONOMIC SYSTEMS RESOLVED INTO BASIC SOCIAL PROCESSES, by Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom. Harper & Brothers, New York. 1953. 557 pp. The past ten years have not been easy for democratic socialist …
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, …
How 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 …
Communications 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 …
Miscellany The master no longer says: ‘You shall think as I do or you shall die’; he says: ‘You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property and all your power; but you are …
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 …
