Winter 2026

Editors: Have you read Galbraith’s Affluent Society? I don’t know what your plans are for dealing with it in DISSENT, [see p. 84] but I do know that it strikes me as a piece of wrong-headed smugness which deserves the …

The economy, like any organism, can absorb only so many minor injuries before the cumulative impact begins to undermine the economic health of the nation. Builtin stabilizers of unemployment compensation, social security, and the like may pull the economy out …

The general consensus that there has been a significant change in political mood, a shift toward liberalism, seems correct. It is, of course, extremely welcome, offering new possibilities for people of our persuasion; though we should take care to make …

Let me go directly to the heart of the matter: at present, there is no more politics in France. No more politics, that is, if we mean by politics a reasonable calculation of the balance of those forces able to …

JULY 14, 1959 Now that it is all over it is easy to think back and realize that today’s events had been well prefigured, even before the Soviet launching of Sputnik I in October of 1957. I remember having read …

Of all the puzzles which a puzzled Eisenhower-Dulles administration has failed to solve, one of the most important is the proper relationship between military power and foreign policy. It is a difficult problem to grasp, let alone solve, and for …

Dear Lionel, I think that Doctor Zhivago is one of the most beautiful novels written since Proust, if not the most beautiful. I don’t see, in fact, what other contemporary novelist, with the possible exception of Faulkner, can be compared …

At first one thinks, this is a horrible joke. Could such an article have been written by Hannah Arendt, the author of the book on totalitarianism? So one then looks for the obvious clues one has missed, the clues which …

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 …

On March 6, 1957, the former colony of the Gold Coast became an independent nation within the British Commonwealth and took the name of Ghana, thereby recalling a West African empire of…

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…

For months, it is now clear, there had been a conspiracy to overthrow the French republic. Organized by extreme rightists and semi-fascists in France and Algeria, this conspiracy soon entangled…