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 …
The American residing in Europe seems always to be confronted with the perennial attempt to sum up America in a word. The word used to be gangsters or skyscrapers; today it is often McCarthyism. This insistence on reducing the irreducible …
Unless man is to drop to all fours, backbones roundabout need a bit of stiffening. In some measure, perhaps, this generally seedy book (FALSE WITNESS, by Harvey Matusow. New York: Cameron & Kahn. 255 pp. Cloth $3. Paper $1.25) written …
THE GREAT CRASH, 1929, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Houghton, Mifflin Co., Boston. 1955. 212 pages. $3.00. When John Kenneth Galbraith, the noted Harvard economist, testified recently before the friendly Fulbright committee on the condition of the stock market, prices took …
VISITS TO OTHER WORLDS have often been thought of as difficult, even traumatic experiences. Through the fantasy of spatial travel, the visitor would try to confront elements within his thought or feeling he had previously hesitated to acknowledge. But, apparently, …
