Baran’s Book Editors: Lewis Coser’s review of Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth is tendentious, misleading, and sciolistic. I say this only after re-reading both Coser’s review and Baran’s book. Invective may be invigorating; it is not a substitute for …
When the state has to exercise its monopoly on the instruments of physical violence it is symptomatic of either a breakdown or a weakening of authority. This applies to Little Rock as well as Budapest. Little Rock, of course, is …
The economic upswing of the past ten to twelve years has come to an end. Full employment, prevalent for most of this period, is now in jeopardy. Though enjoined by law to maintain full employment, the government has deliberately abetted …
Mass Culture, compiled by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, is the first book that has ever tempted me to apply the reviewer’s cliche, “definitive.” The theoretical, historical, statistical, cultural, anthropological, depth-analytical, polemical, prophetical articles in it on TV, the …
Probably, we will never he able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. for the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the …
Daniel Bell, the labor editor of Fortune and a former editor of The New Leader, modestly calls his little essay “notes on work … [tied together] by a mood, and some questions.” Indeed, had he elaborated on all the ideas …
A political party, wrote Edmund Burke at the dawn of the nation-state, “is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” This description no …
So great a legion of ideological interests is choking the media of communication of the world today that I deem it advisable to define the terms in which I speak and for whom. In the heated, charged, and violently partisan …
My thesis is that the United States is moving simultaneously toward and away from social equality, and that the tension between the two movements is to a large degree responsible for the present social and political mood. The movement toward …
Writers on the problem of ideology frequently describe it as an expression of a group or class view which gives the individual both an awareness and rationalization of his particular social role. Developing complex ideological systems along these lines was …
Among professional political scientists the late Franz Neumann easily took a position hors cadre. In a drab trade he excelled in brilliance. Among circumspect searchers of validated facts he stood out as a man of ideas and an author of …
The posthumous collection of Franz Neumann’s essays (The Democratic and Authoritarian State, The Free Press, 1957) underlines the tragedy of his death. Some of the essays are diffuse and obscure, others unfinished; and the collection as a whole does not …
In the postwar era, philosophy in West Germany has mainly been considering the relative merits of Heidegger, Husserl and Kant. As in America, outside the polarity of existentialism and positivism, little has come along to excite either students or scholars. …
A prime factor in the 20th Century Industrial Revolution and the reorganization of society that has accompanied it, science is today itself being reorganized. The rationalists are being rationalized. As science has become more important to industry and government, changes …
Readers of DISSENT are, or should be, already familiar with the thesis of this important book. It is that the Communist revolution has resulted in the total control of the state (which is bigger than society) by the party bureaucracy …
