As an explanation of the higher circles in American life, The Power Elite* is enormously valuable. One can scarcely overpraise C. Wright Mills for this latest installment in a series that, if continued, may assume almost Balzacian proportions. Not that he …
The interview given by Palmiro Togliatti to Nuovi Argomenti (reprinted in the New York Times) is the best-known reaction of Italian Communism to the Khrushchev revelations; but it is not necessarily the most important one. The Report presented by Togliatti …
THE TORMENT OF SECRECY, by Edward A. Shils. Free Press, Glencoe, Ill. $3.50. Edward A. Shils, a prominent sociologist who teaches at the University of Chicago, has written a skillful and provocative book which investigates “the background and consequences of …
It is all beginning again. Ike is beaming and putting; Adlai dodging and quipping; Estes preparing to shake several million hands; and Dick, that Devil’s darling of the liberals, has turned tame, his gift for nastiness suppressed in preparation for …
KARL MARX, SELECTED WRITINGS IN SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, edited with an introduction and notes by T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel. Watts & Co. London, 1956. 268 pp. 21 s. This book is required reading for all DISSENT readers. …
OVER THE YEARS, I have had a few mixed feelings about the Marine Corps. It is not easy for me to defend them, yet in a curious way I suppose I respect the Marine Corps more than the Army. Discounting …
Top military men.., believe that Okinawa has decided advantages over Japan and the Philippines as a site for American air bases. They point out that in Japan and the Philippines the US must deal with independent governments which may not …
In Power Elite one may discern three tasks: (1) to describe the locus of power and its organization in American society, (2) to interpret this power configuration, explain its causes and the direction of its movement, (3) to pass judgment …
EIGHT YEARS AGO the Truman administration issued the first list of governmentally proscribed organizations in American history. At the time the Attorney General’s “subversive list” was published, the proscription was supposed to extend only to government jobs for persons who …
It is Sidney Lens’s contention that not two but three socio-economic systems confront each other in the world today. They are communism, capitalism and feudalism. The first is present in Russia, its satellites and China; the second in the U.S., …
IT WAS ONLY after the second world war that one became aware of a new political type—the public figure who spoke favorably of Russia not because he had illusions about the nature of Stalinism but beause he did not. One …
In September 1954 Fortune magazine ran an article severely criticizing the use of psychological “personality tests” on business executives. It was not simply a run-of-the-mill attack upon science as science, or even upon pseudo-science as science. Instead, it was relatively …
Any contraction of the Cold War and ensuing attempts to “normalize” international relations raise fresh hopes for a peaceful solution of the prevailing imperialist antagonisms. For the Western world this involves new evaluations of the Bolshevik regimes and their aggressive …
We have to go back to the witch doctors or the Shakespeare of Hamlet or Macbeth to reach a world in which spectres, abstract beings, names come to life, “objective powers” play so large a part as they do in …
Democracy and Planning Editors: I read Stuart Hampshire’s article, “In Defense of Radicalism,” (DISSENT, Spring ’56) with great interest and agree essentially with his notions of the function of the radical in society. However, Mr. Hampshire seems to have overlooked …
