“What has changed in Poland since October? Gomulka has changed.” This joke, circulating in Warsaw a year and a half after the Polish “spring in October,” is characteristic of the current mood of disenchantment. Polish intellectuals who were in the …
There can be no doubt that the mandarins, whose authority derived from the acquisition of knowledge, were the country’s only wielders of power, nor that as a class they were firmly opposed to technical progress and social change. Thus, if …
A great deal of fuss is being made over the discovery, in England, of a group of angry young men. The title, thank heavens, is not a self-designation; it is a free gift of the week-end reviewers. Even the New …
One advantage of living in a nation like Britain is that it occasionally produces a point of view that has not occurred to Americans. The current discussion in America on mass culture has been concerned mainly with its effect on …
Once upon a time there was a myth named le proletariat. Though obviously a male, the myth was believed to be pregnant with child— a well conformed socialistic baby true to the Scriptures. Baby being long overdue, the congregation of …
It is a bitter fact concerning our time that a scientific development so remarkable as the launching of sputnik should have evoked responses of fear and dread. Let us be candid: these were responses shared by all honest and sensitive …
The boundless power of the party machine over public life is constantly being confirmed; in private conversation and on the printed page we return to this problem in the weary tones of recrimination and impotence. Is there any point, we …
The German election this past fall followed a pattern that had already been set four years earlier. Then, as now, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) entered a national election with some reason for hope. During the last four years it …
In the last year or so, theory has become news. The debate over the character of the changes taking place in Russian society has been carried on, not merely by a few radical intellectuals, but by government officials, newspapermen, indeed …
Each generation sees history through lenses ground by its own experience. In these days of recoil from radical involvement it is hardly surprising that reinterpretations of just those phases of Western history in which the radical impulse was strongest have …
THE MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST, by Dwight Macdonald. Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy This book, as a book, doesn’t add much to the wealth of nations. It is foolishly inconsistent, not often thought-provoking, not informative (except perhaps to the young who …
In his review of Milovan Djilas’ New Class, [DISSENT, Fall 1957] Norman Thomas necessarily had to stress the general and very powerful job of debunking which this book has performed. But there is one problem touched upon by Djilas which …
Suppose one were to pose the question: why is anxiety so endemic to our current national life? The most likely response would be a supercilious shrug: naturally, anxiety must be the common state of those who have lived through upheaval, …
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 …
