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 …
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 …
