Hannah Arendt’s Reflections Editors: In the Winter 1959 issue of DISSENT, Miss Hannah Arendt quotes in the preliminary statement to her article, “Reflections on Little Rock,” some remarks I made about Negroes being less interested in abolishing laws against miscegenation …
That we are, as a nation, engaged in a great public debate about education is quite evident. It is equally evident that this debate would be most salutary if it were being conducted with adequate knowledge on all sides, and …
I went to Cuba at a time when, by the standards of the daily press, nothing important was taking place: there was only the buildup for the crisis expected after the November 1958 election. Not until later did the correspondents …
The first industrial revolution began in England, spread to the Continental mainland, and then crossed the Atlantic to the United States. Only generations later did it affect Russia, and even then only in part, whilst the peoples of Asia were …
It has often been rumoured that Bertolt Brecht, the great German Communist poet, had been severely critical of the East German regime despite his show of Stalinist orthodoxy. The German magazine Neue Deutsche Hefte (No. 52) now publishes an article …
Slightly more than thirty years ago, in October 1928, the first Five-Year Plan was launched. For three decades the resources of a vast country, the energies of a large and talented population, and the capacity of a most elaborate and …
Politics, as everyone knows, is the art of drawing distinctions. It involves, to be sure, the pursuit and use—as well as the misuse—of power; but we seek that power for the potential good, not the evil, that its possession affords. …
The Mindless Typewriter If Dwight Macdonald’s “America!—Americal” [DISSENT, Fall 1958] were read by the European audience for whom it was intended, would it satisfy their curiosity about this strange land? What European needs to be told that there is a …
Preliminary Remarks This article was written more than a year ago upon the suggestion of one of the editors of Commentary. It was a topical article whose publication was delayed for months because of the controversial nature of my reflections …
In the nineteenth century the academic man was shielded, at least in part, from the general transformation of labor into a commodity. In our own time, as professors Caplow and McGee demonstrate in their valuable and informative study, the academician …
Our society prides itself on the fact that the concentration camp remains a thing apart, a distinctive feature of totalitarian society. We have prisons, of course, but the prisoner is usually protected from starvation, unrestrained brutality, and pitiless economic exploitation. …
“A Society that can afford atomic bombs can afford some good psychiatry,” say the authors in their conclusions to this book, after documenting in impressive detail that at present American society provides scandalously poor psychiatric care to the majority of …
THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. 1958. J. K. Galbraith, the well-known Harvard professor, has worked out a plan for a socialist society. I don’t mean to frighten him or some of his faithful readers. (I …
SOVIET MARXISM: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS, by Herbert Marcuse Columbia University Press, New York 1958. History written from the viewpoint of victorious politicians and generals always carries the onus of apology: apology for the present rulers who are the heirs of …
What shall we call the new Pope when he dies? That will be something of a problem, since the recently-deceased Pius XII was so regularly hailed as “the greatest” in the American press. Harry Truman at least tried to qualify …
