WRITE a long, flowing political novel about a small group of Old Left, Anti-Stalinist socialists, tracing their paths from a youthful idealism in the late thirties to a weariness in the early sixties. Weave together their tangled personal lives and …
FEW SCHOLARS HAVE INFLUENCED our thinking about “extremism” as much as Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of social relations at Harvard. The first writer to apply the concept of a “radical Right” to American social movements (in 1951), he later proposed …
The Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu boasts a long, international-award-winning bibliography of poetry and prose. Yet in his fiction, he often speaks through narrators hostile to publication and recognition.
No play as important, as interesting as Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy has been shown for a very long time—and no play as interesting in an important way. I would insist, too, that the importance of the work is due not …
In the last few months, especially since the war in Vietnam and protests against it have both escalated, a number of commentators from many wings of opinion—right, center, and socialist—have expressed a great deal of doubt about and disapproval of …
I never met a colleague in the teaching of a college history course who expected to learn very much from grading a batch of blue books. Yet an untidy pile of essays on my desk—essays designed to persuade me that …
Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor by Thomas R. Brooks, foreword by A.H. Raskin Delacorte, 300 pp., $6.00 There are Civil War buffs who read and reread the chronicles of that immensely important time. There are labor buffs …
The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience by Harold Rosenberg Horizon Press, 270 pp., $7.50 I praised Harold Rosenberg’s first volume of criticism (The Tradition of the New) for its variety: this new volume must be praised for its …
There are all sorts of ironies in a Dissent issue devoted to New York City. In one sense, nothing could be more obvious. Most of Dissent’s editors have spent most of their lives in or near this city. Indeed, the …
In her excellent, tightly reasoned “Against Academic Boycotts” (Dissent, Summer 2007), Martha Nussbaum notes that the “main force of the boycott” is directed against “individual members of the [Israeli] institutions,” who are accused of not condemning their “government as much …
The Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art offers a place for working-class art without tokenizing or empty gestures of representation.
It was expected that General Motors would announce plant closings. But when the announcement came last November, the scale was astounding: 29,000 workers in 11 plants laid off. Almost two-thirds of the affected unionized workers (17,450) live in Michigan. As …
It’s almost as though an “iron law” operates in all the communist countries, varied though they are. They seem haunted by the specter of democracy, especially when they seek to reform their moribund economies. Their economic growth and individual well-being …
Editors: Julian Mayfield’s letter rebutting Lewis Coser’s assessment of his piece in the “Young Radicals” symposium was printed without comment, I suppose, on grounds that it damns itself. It does. One hates to fall back on labels, but the fact …
Make no mistake about it—the great American economy is stumbling over its feet. Between 1958 and 1962, according to the Council of Economic Advisers, the gap between what we produced and what we could have produced amounted to almost $1000 …
