Fall 2024

I AM sE1TING down the following melancholy reflections not with any hope of a remedy, but because the matter is important and nobody else seems to be saying it. In many ways literature…

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 …

The celebrated episode of the trip of the `Bolshevik leaders” across Germany within a “sealed train” has caused as much ink to run as the accusation of being in the pay of the Kaiser, examined below. But the episode is …

After a decade of injustice, the Attorney General of the United States casually removed the Independent Socialist League from his List of Subversive Organizations a month or so ago. In announcing the decision, no reference was made to the merits …

The end result of Henry Pachter’s contribution to DISSENT’S discussion of contemporary foreign policy [Spring, 1958] is to compound the confusion of an already chaotic situation. George Orwell once observed that the English language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our …

ORIENTAL DESPOTISM, by Karl August Wittfogel. Yale University Press, 1957 In calling his book “a comparative study of total power,” the author is doing himself justice, for the book indeed is an immense file case of characteristics which at various …

Dwight Macdonald writes: “America! America!” was written early this year as a New York letter to Encounter. The editors accepted it, then a month or so later rejected it, then almost immediately reaccepted it, and finally after another six weeks …

In the time of the war lords and of the Koumintang, it was not so hard for leftists, even Stalinists, to write something readable about China. Your leftist went there in person, and afterwards reported frankly what he had seen …

The contempt frequently expressed by many economists toward Karl Marx first began to dissolve when the growth of monopoly and the possibility of such disturbing phenomena as unemployment became genuine realities. More and more, social scientists came to agree that …

The events which follow took place between the months of June and December, 1956. The battalion to which I belonged was principally composed of young draftees, led by regular army officers and non-commissioned officers who had all had a year …

Editors: In the last issue of DISSENT you carry a review of Nkrumah’s Ghana by M. K. Kamath. The author of this review implies that Nkrumah alone freed Ghana and created the “Secret Circle” and the Convention People’s Party. The …

How far are the political decisions of the Soviet leaders influenced by their belief in an official ideology—and how far are they empirical responses to objective conflcts of interest, to real situations of power, which are only expressed in ideological …

Dear Nick: When I read your piece in Partisan Review [Winter 1958] on Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago I was struck by your enthusiasm for the novel (I had not yet read it), and puzzled by the fact that your very great …

ALGERIA: THE REALITIES, by Germaine Tillion. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1958. Germaine Tillion’s Algeria is a beautifully written, but seriously flawed, book. The author, an ethnologist and a leading French authority on the sociology of Algeria, has put together …

The Chinese “100 Flowers” or “rectification” episode— heralded as an Asian “thaw” when it was first announced in early 1957 —ended this winter with the fourth of the great purges which the Communist regime has conducted since coming to power …