Fall 2024

I wish to compliment you on the Summer, 1961 issue of DISSENT. It is a constructive, revealing, often startling portrait of a city written by men and women who care about both its present and future. I was especially impressed …

Ghosts of the past haunt the political scene. Epithets like “cold war,” “isolationism,” and “appeasement” are heard again. While the Administration is trying to normalize relations with China or to find ways of accommodation with the future rulers of Africa, it hears charges from all sides: …

American armed forces today, including as they do levies of conscripts, do not constitute an army of citizen-soldiers. They are not subject to effective democratic control. Elimination of conscription will not introduce a “mercenary army”: we already have one. On …

Three years after President Kennedy’s assassination, we still don’t know much more than on the day after it. Nor are we ever likely to know more. The Warren Commission and its critics have not produced conclusive evidence of either Oswald’s …

In foreign affairs, no rule applies over long periods of time. Only the simple-minded imagine that, once committed to a crusade, a government must continue it until either victory or defeat. Or like children watching a Western, they assume that …

“MANY a traveler has wondered why the Wameriku habitually sacrifice their lives to their curious ideas on traffic and mobility. As is well known, thousands yearly suffer death on the roads for no other reason than an apparent compulsion to …

In the Autumn 1957 DISSENT, Henri Rabasseire continued his attack on the Protestant work ethic which he had started with his fine piece “The Right to be Lazy” in Winter 1956. I am in full agreement with him that it …

Ideas change but their formulas remain. Two people a thousand years apart may be of the same mind though they strove for different things; on the other hand, no bore is more boring than the disciple who quotes what I …

Daniel Bell, the labor editor of Fortune and a former editor of The New Leader, modestly calls his little essay “notes on work … [tied together] by a mood, and some questions.” Indeed, had he elaborated on all the ideas …

What the Lord did on the eighth day the Bible does not state; it is permitted to speculate that He continued to rest and, for all that the last million years’ record shows, never returned to the hectic working spree …

Mr. Deutscher’s able paper raises a number of problems which certainly go far beyond the immediate purpose of his analysis; yet they go right to the heart of the question which prompts him and others to discuss the future of …