I Described by Eisenhower economists as a sideways movement, the downward turn in 1954 was overcome in a relatively quick reaction. Late in the year the major indices began to move up again and by July 1955 it was evident …
The following comment by the Italian writer was made in response to a critical article written about his work in a French magazine. Mr. Silone has been kind enough to send it to DISSENT for American publication. How can a writer discuss decently …
What the Lord did on the eighth day the Bible does not state; it is permitted to speculate that He continued to rest and, for all that the last million years’ record shows, never returned to the hectic working spree …
We are now witnessing one of our periodic “crises” in social control. Though official statistics show a sharp increase in the crime rate, particularly among adolescents, we will never know the extent to which this crisis is being fabricated. Since …
(The following article is part of a much longer chapter from a forthcoming book on “The Political Novel,” to be published by Horizon Press in 1956. It does not propose a full analysis of Silone’s writings, but tries to present him in a certain …
Morris Raphael Cohen, an extraordinarily gifted teacher, was best known as a critic of other philosophers. People would sometimes grumble about his “negativism”: Cohen tore down systems of philosophy without offering a clear alternative. On one such occasion he is …
About 50,000 Americans are dope addicts; a quarter of a million children between 7 and 17 are arraigned in juvenile courts each year, and 1,-750,000 serious crimes are committed by adults; 18 per cent of the draftees rejected by the …
In trying to refute the argument of my article “The Social Implications of Freudian ‘Revisionism’” (DISSENT, Summer 1955), Erich Fromm has constructed a thesis which I did not state ( “The Human Implications of Instinctivistic ‘Radicalism’” by Erich Fromm, DISSENT, …
Modern mass consumption is a sum of solo performances; each consumer, an unpaid homeworker employed in the production of the mass man. In the days before the cultural faucets of radio and television had become standard equipment in each home, the Smiths …
The abolition of capitalism alone will not insure the future of civilization. The character of modern industrial labor—repetitive, monotonous, segmented, cut off from directed thought—considerably modifies the problem of socialism. Those who would speak seriously of a socialism which will respect the human person …
A strange silence fell over the British Labor Party immediately after its electoral defeat. Even the flurry of mutual recrimination within the party leadership hardly lasted more than a few days. The annual party conference held in October of last …
The last three months of 1955 were marked by one dominant event: the collapse of the “Geneva spirit,” at least until expediency requires its resurrection, and a return to the cold war with the position of the West considerably weakened. …
For a while it seemed as if there were no more challenging problem in our domestic life than McCarthyism. To be sure, the man and the ism were shorthand for a cluster of unpleasant—not to say symptomatic—developments. How did the …
I would not think it necessary to impose upon the patience of the readers of DISSENT by a counter-rebuttal of Herbert Marcuse’s reply to me, were it only in order to answer his argument, or his added interpretation of The …
Political myths bury their undertakers. At the turn of this century, archaic modes of political thought had supposedly been laid to rest forever. The men of the Progressive movement thought of themselves as children of the Enlightenment, armed with instrumentalism …
