SEPTEMBER 7, 1991 The remarkable events in the Soviet Union since the failed coup of August 18–remarkable both for the depth and rapidity of change-make it almost reckless to venture a serious comment as we prepare this issue of Dissent …
Schools reflect a culture; they do not transform it—Unsigned review, The New Yorker, November 16, 1963. A university should not be a weather vane, responsive to every variation of popular whim. Universities must at times give society, not what society …
With the fatality of opportunism, the government is pursuing its prosecution of the Communist Party under the McCarran Act of 1950. After 12 years of harassment, it is now within striking distance and may again succeed — some triumph! —in …
This carefully laundered selection from the cultural journal of American Stalinism during the 1930s has been put together by one of its early editors, one of the few who never kicked the totalitarian habit. North has excerpted material (some of …
Debates between socialists and liberals are not new. But nor, perhaps, are they completely irreconcilable. [From the archives]
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death by Albert Camus. Knopf. 272 pp. $4.00. By comparison with the work of men like Koestler, Silone and Orwell, Albert Camus’ writing has always seemed to me somewhat grandiose and porous. He lacked Koestler’s capacity for …
Margarethe von Trotta’s new film, Hannah Arendt, revisits the furor provoked by Arendt’s analysis of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. “Within the New York intellectual world,” wrote Irving Howe, Eichmann in Jerusalem “provoked divisions that would never be entirely healed.”
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Irving Howe on Tiananmen Activism
There are two Edward Saids. One is a literary scholar and critic, cultivated, knowledgeable, and, notwithstanding his interest in the literature of the third world, a traditionalist in taste. The other is a spokesman for the Palestinian cause and adherent …
Daughter of a prominent Bolshevik intellectual, Anna Larina was twenty years old when she married the forty-five-year-old Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin in 1935. As a little girl delighted by Bukharin’s playfulness and charm, she had looked forward to his visits …
When Michael Harrington’s The Other America began to win a large audience after its publication in 1962, both he and his friends were very much surprised. I remember thinking that Mike’s book, fine as it was, would probably be numbered …
We live in a time of diminished expectations. It’s not exactly a time of conservative dominance, although the dominant politics in some countries is an unenthusiastic conservatism. Nor is it a time of liberal dominance, although in the United States …
I voted for Clinton, I was glad he won—if only because his victory brought to an end twelve dreary years of right-wing domination. Whatever our hopes or expectations, large or modest, regarding the near future, we know at least that …
This is a moment for questions. Probably the ones we ask ourselves are not very different from those our readers would ask. So here’s an effort by one Dissent editor to provide, not exhaustive or definitive, but brief and provisional …
