Winter 2026

Ever since Francis Bacon in The Wisdom of the Ancients revised the earliest myths of the race in order to make man over, it has been a habit of the modern mind to interpret actions in the form of myth. …

The phrase “the end of ideology” is becoming a catchword which sums up a major tendency of our time. Daniel Bell chose it as the title for his recently published collection of essays on American politics and culture. Edward Shils …

An editorial in the April, 1960 issue of Socialist Comentary begins as follows: It would be stupid to deny that demoralization has overtaken the Labor Party since the election. What could be more depressing than the contrast between the position …

Anything as bad a TV must be susceptible to some improvement, but the one sure way of not getting it is to make the programs more “cultural.” The TV chains and the FCC are momentarily nervous, and so they chatter …

THE POLITICS OF MASS SOCIETY, by William Kornhauser. Free Press. 1959. Of all the words employed by Socialists, Sociologists, Liberals, Political Scientists, Writers and Literary Critics, none has been so abused as the word “mass.” Whether it has been applied …

THE ECLIPSE OF COMMUNITY, by Maurice R. Stein. Princeton University Press. 1960. The Eclipse of Community is a reasoned manual of important American community studies of the past fifty years. One of its great merits is how it implicitly tells …

THE ORDEAL and spectacular death of King Kong, the giant ape, undoubtedly have been witnessed by more Americans than have ever seen a performance of Hamlet, Iphigenia at Aulis, or even Tobacco Road. Since RKO-Radio Pictures first released King Kong, …

Editors: Irving Howe claims that if Christ gave his Sermon on the Mount next week, among other routine reactions would be that “Dwight Macdonald would write that while ‘Mr. Christ makes some telling points’ they suffer from syntactical confusion and …

Durham, North Carolina is probably a town like many others; I doubt that ordinarily I would have found it unfamiliar. I saw it, however, only at night and carried away only two memories. The…

Growing up as a human being, a “human nature” assimilates a culture, just as other animals grow up in strength and habits in their appropriated environments, that complete their natures. Present-day sociologists and anthropologists don’t talk much about this process, …

In the last decade or so the American university has been put to unprecedented use by industry, the mass media and research teams, as well as by intellectuals who find it a handy home base. One result has been a …

If there is to be an American political left in the 1960s and 70s it will be led, for the most part, by radical students of today and tomorrow, rather than by those who received their political training in the …

Whatever its deficiencies, the younger generation has not suffered from a lack of labels. The era has been called shook-up and apathetic; white-collared and black-leather-jacketed; organized and uncommitted. But in all this generation-labeling perhaps the largest and most important segment …

Many students today are more interested in examples to follow than ideas to promote. They look for styles of life that will allow them the substance or illusion of personality. They search for external marks that may validate a hoped-for …