This issue of DISSENT is devoted to reports and interpretations—mostly reports—of the American scene. We have asked a number of writers to describe those aspects of our national life with which they are most familiar. What they wrote, we have …
Punch recently published a cartoon that shows three frightened little men storming into a launching station for guided missiles and shouting, “It’s coming back!” John Foster Dulles must have had similar feelings during the last few months as his whole …
IN EARLY July 1956 James Burnham made his appearance as a government witness at a Department of Justice hearing held as the climax to a six -year-long effort by the Independent Socialist League to have its name removed from the …
KARL MARX, SELECTED WRITINGS IN SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, edited with an introduction and notes by T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel. Watts & Co. London, 1956. 268 pp. 21 s. This book is required reading for all DISSENT readers. …
Among the few successes of DISSENT we count the fact that we have been able in some minor way to establish a link between radicals of an older generation and younger men and women who are untouched and even bored by the rhetoric of the thirties, yet repelled and frightened by the realities of the fifties.
Reading recent interpretations of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, one is inclined to feel that they reveal far less about the character of the changes in Russian politics and society than about the moods …
CONFLICT, by Georg Simmel. Free Press. $3.50. The name of Georg SimmeI is barely known in America, and that only among professional sociologists. This is a pity, since Simmel is one of the handful of eminent European sociological theorists whose …
Two months ago the largest atomic bomb yet tested in the Nevada desert brought sudden sunrise to cities 300 miles away. Only two miles from the center of the explosion a small town had been built with no purpose other …
Geltman’s and Plastrik’s critique of my essay seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding of what a typological procedure aims to accomplish. Social scientists can use concepts which are closely geared to the empirical and historical reality at …
I. The Sociology of the Sect A sect, as the Latin etymology suggests, consists of men who have cut themselves off from the main body of society. They have formed a restricted and closed group which rejects the norms of …
Mr. Deutscher’s article provides so welcome a relief from the tedious speculations, prophecies, and ritualistic expressions of horror which nowadays pass for analysis of Russian society in the pages of American publications, that one is tempted to relax into unqualified …
Such is the nature of the operations of the Communist party that all evidence about its key work must necessarily come from informers—that is, from those who have seen it from the inside. As Burnham points out, the pejorative connotations …
Political thinking, like merchandising, has its fashions.
Radicals of the thirties, Travers Clement has recently suggested, can be classified as repenters and dissenters. The former predominate.
Shared knowledge is the precondition of shared action. Without knowledge men are automatically excluded from decision making.
