The censor’s work is never secure, for history deals harshly with yesterday’s moral judgments. The road from the 1909 Chicago censor’s refusal to license two feckless horse operas (“Tile James Boys” and “Night Riders”) to this year’s unstinting praise for …
Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is one of the finest books ever written by an American social scientist. With relentless intellectual honesty and range, Moore manages to shed new light on some of the central questions of …
The first question I want to raise is that of the priority to be given to industry and agriculture in the underdeveloped countries’ present situation. Intellectuals in underdeveloped countries largely pin their hopes on industrialization; and I want to emphasize …
There is a positivist school of political science that devotes itself to the analysis of power. It is value-free about things like justice or commonwealth; and it pays as little mind as possible to causes like class interests or historical …
The “end of the ideologies,” diagnosed by Raymond Aron, among others, refers generally to the developed societies of America and Western Europe. It connects prosperity, economic growth, and social integration on the one hand with the progressive decline of political …
Richard Flacks’s article is the most serious discussion of “participatory democracy” that has yet come out of the New Left, and with most of it I am not in fundamental disagreement. I have some questions, or different emphases. Flacks defines …
In his 1966 State of the Union message, Lyndon B. Johnson said that if the war in Vietnam were to go on, it should not be financed at the expense of the worst-off in the society but rather by the …
For long stretches of history, no one but the poor has been interested in poverty; but at intervals—and we are in one such period now—it has become respectable to see it as a problem. Sociologists, economists, social workers, and politicians of …
Let us recall the early days of our struggle when, in 1954, the Supreme Court made its historic decision. A great psychological ferment began to take place, which, as you know, was followed by a period of intense direct action. …
I write these lines as a hasty last-minute response to the news that the CIA has been secretly subsidizing certain activities abroad of the National Student Association (NSA) and other student groups. By the time this issue of DISSENT reaches …
A good part of the comment about the dispute inside the AFL-CIO has been empty of understanding. Reporters have made much of the votes inside the Executive Council, but these votes have limited meaning. Jacob Potofsky of the Amalgamated Clothing …
Many arguments, good and not so good, poor and spurious, have been invoked in the controversy about the Warren Commission; that is, about the more or less voluntary confusion shrouding the investigation of the murder of President Kennedy. Compared to …
Defense Secretary McNamara recently announced to the Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars a “salvage” operation aimed at bringing tens of thousands of “SubStandard” youths into the armed forces—for their own good, of course. He proposed—and has since instituted—a …
Both countries groan under the weight of the problems connected with modernization. But they take sharply different paths, and the contrast is instructive. India is not a happy land today— far from it. At least 1-0 million of its people …
You don’t have to come South to see the face of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. You can see it—the concave cheeks, the deep-set pale blue eyes, the blowy, sandy hair—in the meaner streets of Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland. These are the …
