I Murray Kempton’s book (PART OF OUR TIME, by Murray Kempton. Simon & Schuster. 334 pp. $4.) of portraits from the radical thirties has been reviewed with praise by such writers as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr and Daniel Bell. …
“The guaranteed annual wage is not a stepping stone to full security, but a milepost in a social struggle that never ends because the ramifications of America’s economy are such that with each new round of the class struggle something is almost always gained but nothing is ever solved.”
One of the most singular advantages we derive from machinery is in the check which it affords against the inattention, idleness, or the knavery of human agents. CHARLES BABBAGE, The Economy of Machinery, 1832. The unequivocal statement can be made …
During the past few months ex-Senator Harry Cain has defended the Fifth Amendment; a Senate Committee has expressed doubts about the workings of the Attorney General’s “Subversive List”; the State Department, in an orgy of issuing passports as an aftermath …
I What is remarkable about the manufacture of myths in the twentieth century is that it takes place under the noses of living witnesses of the actual events and, in fact, cannot dispense with their collaboration. Everyone is familiar with …
For a quarterly to indulge in a retrospect after two years of existence might seem a little premature. But those who know the difficulties of publishing a magazine like DISSENT may forgive us the indulgence. Besides, there may be some …
Sometimes cant harms no one but those who speak it; sometimes, as the wretched mishandling of the polio problem by the Eisenhower administration shows, it can endanger thousands of people. No one who remembers the hopes of April 12 when …
I am glad to have the opportunity of answering Herbert Marcuse’s article on the “Social Implications of Freudian Revisionism” in the last issue of this journal. This is so partly because Marcuse singles me out as a representative of the …
I This comment on the international situation and plea that politically conscious Americans, especially non-Stalinists, should give more support to the development of a Third Camp starts with several assumptions. I shall not attempt to argue their validity, save in …
The extent to which Proudhon’s contributions to radical thought are overlooked even among radicals was impressed upon me by a recent article in DISSENT (Spring, 1954) in which Lewis Coser and Irving Howe discussed the differences between Marx and his …
I. The Two Nations For a generation after the Civil War, a time of great economic exploitation and waste, grave social corruption and ugliness, the dominant note in American political life was complacency. Although dissenting minorities were always present, they …
This book, says the author, was designed to “open a window into the mind of America” and perhaps it has succeeded even better than Mr. Stouffer had intended because, in a way, its motivation and conception, its mode of procedure …
The great advantage of repudiating one’s past is that it provides a standpoint from which to scourge the past of others. Accordingly we are now being shown by Mr. Lionel Trilling that in Britain, just as in America, the 1930s …
G. D. H. Cole has undertaken the exceptionally difficult task of preparing a general history of socialist thought as distinguished from a history of the socialist movement. This work, to run to four volumes when complete, is presently at the …
THE VERY SUMMER which finds the Russian and American governments drawing closer together seems also to find the Russian and American people approximating one another, so far as one can tell, in the quality of their mood. Both give the …
