The question, why be radical?, is more urgent today than in those more stringent times when radicalism tended to be instinctive. Especially for the intellectual who finds easy employment in a time of know-how-to-no-purpose, the question is pressing and doubly …
What has been most depressing, and at times downright infuriating, about the recent discussions of the problem of integration is that the terms of discourse tend increasingly to be those of the Southern enemies of equality for the Negroes. And …
1. The modern Infinite. Faust Is dead If there is anything that modern man regards as infinite, it is no longer God; nor is it nature, let alone morality or culture; it is his own power. Creatio ex nihilo, which …
MONTGOMERY, ALA. Suddenly, Montgomery, Alabama, has become one of the world’s most interesting cities. It is a handsome little town, restful for an ex-urbanite. In its center is a spacious circle with gently flowing water-spray, covered by soft lights in the evening. From it …
True enough the Ford people asked Walter Reuther how he was going to collect dues from those automata and Walter Reuther answered how are you going to sell them cars. It is also so that Newsweek said that the Ford …
The civil war in Spain ended twenty years ago. That’s what people say. Practical and realistic men view war as a sport. When a public game is over the people cheer the winner. Those present in the stadium go home. …
I The fall of Juan Peron took place in accordance with the basic rhythm of Latin American politics. The dictator is gone; the historical reasons for his emergence remain. Peron was a stop-gap, a shrewd schemer who by suppressing the …
“Poem for Adults” is one of the most remarkable, documents of our time; nothing that has yet appeared in print so fully reveals the despair felt by intellectuals and writers at having to live in the prison-house of totalitarianism.
Because of the immediacy and urgency of the Algerian crisis and the repressive movement it has called forth we are advancing publication of the exclusive interview given to DISSENT by Messali Hadj, Algerian nationalist leader. This was to have appeared in the Summer issue of …
One reads these days many cries of despair, rumblings of gloom, dark hints of the inadequacy of Reason (and reasoners), of the hopelessness of progress. At the best, one expects invocations of Orwell and Tocqueville, at the worst, of Burke …
Among the few successes of DISSENT we count the fact that we have been able in some minor way to establish a link between radicals of an older generation and younger men and women who are untouched and even bored by the rhetoric of the thirties, yet repelled and frightened by the realities of the fifties.
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, by Georges Friedmann. (Edited and with an introduction by Harold L. Sheppard.) Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1955. 436 pp., $6.00. No Marx-ward inclination is required to see that work is central to man’s fate in modern industrial society. …
Reading recent interpretations of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, one is inclined to feel that they reveal far less about the character of the changes in Russian politics and society than about the moods …
The strikes that have shaken the entire Soviet concentrationary system during the past few years are a new phenomenon, and yet, in certain respects, they recall the phase of the development of the camps that came to an end in …
THE EXURBANITES, by A. C. Spectorsky. Lippincott. $3.95. I looked up recently after a sojourn abroad to find that a new word had sneaked into the language while my back was turned, like the 8:55 crawling into the station at …