Sociology has long concentrated on the study of vertical social mobility, that is the movement of persons up or down the social hierarchy. I wish to point out here that the approach to this subject has so far been unduly …
If the future of the Communist Party seems dim, there have been some developments in the United States these past few years that should encourage those who believe the Soviet Union represents a force for historic progress. Among the disorganized …
The British Labor movement has always been favored, or goaded, by a left wing which felt that Labor lacked full socialist consciousness; in the last decade or two this left wing found popular expression through the oratory of Nye Bevan …
Khrushchev is reported to have remarked that Dr. Zhivago might have been published in the Soviet Union if only a few hundred words had been eliminated. The fact is, of course, that it was not published; but it might be …
Puerto Ricans and Sentimentality Editors: I suppose if one were to total up the comments of Stanley Plastrik in his review of my book, Island in the City, [DISSENT, Spring 1959], the scales would be slightly more weighted on the …
The Kremlin’s actions are impelled not by an ideology but by an objective: to extend the area of its control and to maximize the degree to which it can manipulate and disintegrate those parts of the world not yet under …
THE BROKEN MIRROR, A COLLECTION OF WRITINGS FROM CONTEMPORARY POLAND, Ed. by Pawel Mayewski; Introduction by Lionel Trilling. Random House. New York, 1958. This competent translation of some of the writings of the younger Polish intellectuals in the forefront of …
In the nineteenth century the academic man was shielded, at least in part, from the general transformation of labor into a commodity. In our own time, as professors Caplow and McGee demonstrate in their valuable and informative study, the academician …
THE REVOLUTIONARY THEORIES OF Louis AUGUSTE BLANQUI, by Allan B. Spitzer. Columbia Univ. Press, 1957. This is a painstaking, if somewhat pedestrian, study of the theories of the “first professional revolutionary” of Europe. Blanqui spent forty of his seventy-six years …
Bergson once wrote about the man who, when asked why he didn’t weep at a sermon which reduced everyone else to tears, replied: “I don’t belong to the parish.” Bergson felt that what that man had said of tears was …
Evidence of rather widespread disaffection or at least dissatisfaction among Russian writers has been frequently reported in recent years. We have heard of a number of attempts of Russian novelists, playwrights and critics to express in more or less veiled …
Baran’s Book Editors: Lewis Coser’s review of Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth is tendentious, misleading, and sciolistic. I say this only after re-reading both Coser’s review and Baran’s book. Invective may be invigorating; it is not a substitute for …
Each generation sees history through lenses ground by its own experience. In these days of recoil from radical involvement it is hardly surprising that reinterpretations of just those phases of Western history in which the radical impulse was strongest have …
A political party, wrote Edmund Burke at the dawn of the nation-state, “is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” This description no …
Professor Baran, says the dust jacket, “is probably the only Marxian social scientist teaching at a large American University.” It ain’t necessarily so; but that the Monthly Review editors should believe it is quite revealing. The book purports to be …
