Symposium

I must admit that I felt ambivalent about responding to these questions. My ambivalence derives not from my attitude toward the history of Dissent, but from a certain discomfort with the way the questions have been formulated.

It would be easy to answer the first question with a strong affirmative statement—very much of what Dissent argued against and also a great deal of what it argued for stands up rather well today. Certainly the relentless criticism of both Stalinism and McCarthyism in the first decade or so of the journal, along with the enduring critique of the forms of domination, exclusion, and injustice typical of capitalist systems, and of oligarchic “liberal democratic” polities retain th...