if some of the more extravagant reviews of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s Sovereignty are to be believed, this book is nothing less than a classic. The London Times Literary Supplement proclaimed it “a remarkable achievement . . . a great work …
I would like to suggest that what most characterizes Leon Trostky, and the revolutionary generation he symbolizes, are: 1) the dominance of ideas; 2) the need and willingness to act on them; and 3) the fanatic belief in ideological purity. …
Dear Irving: No doubt there are others, but I have seen only three “negative” U. S. reviews of my essay, The Causes of World War Three. In the Wall Street Journal, William H. Chamberlain wrote—as expected; in the N. Y. …
Men and women carry beneath the burden of their impotence a spark of life, however buried, that flares at the sight of the Stranger. And in this blind light they see his strangeness as the mark of a terrifying freedom. …
THE TRADITION OF THE NEW, by Harold Rosenberg. Horizon, 1959. By a quietly satisfactory law of nature, the brightest people write the best books, if you can get a book out of them. Now a publisher has had the good …
ISLAND IN THE CITY, by Dan Wakefield. Houghton Mifflin Dan Wakefield has written a fine human document about the 600,000 Puerto Ricans in New York City. It is a little on the sentimental side (perhaps in reaction to those who …
THE LATE Alvan T. Fuller, businessman and twice Governor of Massachusetts, collected paintings. It is told that in his lifetime Fuller was a very generous man. Earlier this year some fifty of his best pictures hung in a memorial exhibit …
Professor Alex Inkeles told a group at the University of Michigan that the more often you laugh the higher you are likely to be on the social scale. “Contrary to popular belief,” he said in a lecture, “the lower you …
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 Political Atmosphere Editors: Irving Howe asks the question, “a new political atmosphere in America?” in the Winter 1959 DISSENT. The responses of the other editors (save perhaps Plastrik) are not encouraging. Mailer didn’t vote, Rosenberg “could care less but …
The verb, to co-exist, only has plural forms: we co-exist. Moreover, its voices are passive or reflexive: I suffer your co-existence with me. The relationship so described is neither war nor peace; but it implies a tacit understanding that two …
The rhetoric of equality is a staple of American speech; we devoutly abstain, however, from planning the practice of equality. The amazingly rapid expansion of American education in the past fifty years is indeed an occasion for pride: it is …
What Shakespeare says in Twelfth Night about greatness in men one could also say about that mysterious something in books that makes them bestsellers: Some are born with it, some achieve it, and some have it thrust upon them. An …
Traditionally Marxism has claimed to be a carrier of progress beyond the attainment of capitalism. The argument ran: Capitalism, having reached its summit, is weighed down with internal contradictions. At this point, the proletariat, matured by long apprenticeship in capitalist …
