Imagination always lags behind intellect. We know that it is now possible for the whole world to be blown up by hydrogen bombs, yet we cannot really employ this knowledge: it does not come to us as a living image. …
OUR ELECTIONS ARE NOTABLE for verbiage. But now that the air has been cleared of campaign oratory, what emerges is that only one issue aroused wide-spread interest-prosperity, i.e., full production and full employment. The recent election made it clear that by …
THE 20TH CENTURY CAPITALIST REVOLUTION, by Adolph A. Berle, Jr. Harcourt, Brace and Co., N. Y. 192 pages. $3.00. The place of monopoly in the modern world was highlighted some twenty years ago when Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means published …
In Alamogordo, New Mexico there is a crater covered with a glassy-green scurf of death and surrounded by high-tension wires and alarm systems-the site of the first atomic explosion. The neighboring Pueblo Indians take it for granted that every people …
When Lord Acton declared that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, he may not have been thinking of the slave economy of 18th-century plantations, nor of the kind of peonage that much of 19th-century colonialism still implied. But his …
The following item is reprinted, with permission, from the English monthly Twentieth Century, where it appeared as a note by its editor. We think it an interesting comment on an aspect of American life as seen by an English observer.-Ed. …
. . . Never before had the fact of being an American brought one so close to humiliation. The sight of Washington in August was enough to make one cringe, so enormous was the upsurge of elemental stupidity and reasonless …
It is possible that by the time this issue of DISSENT appears, the problem of Guatemala will have been forgotten, pushed aside by some new catastrophe. But forgotten, we are convinced, only for the moment. What happened there is so …
The Geneva agreement which brought the fighting in Indo-China to an end wrote finis to the French Empire in Asia. France is the last of the European powers to have been driven out of Asia, and with its defeat a …
I. The Sociology of the Sect A sect, as the Latin etymology suggests, consists of men who have cut themselves off from the main body of society. They have formed a restricted and closed group which rejects the norms of …
There are signs that Senator McCarthy is slipping. One holds one’s breath, for he has stormed back into the headlines to win new triumphs before. But whether he stays or goes it is important to define the social and political …
Editors: David Sachs’ article “On Ends Justifying Means” (DISSENT No. 2) seems to me to have treated too lightly certain ethical questions which have long been a source of division in radical movements. Western Socialism has been characterized by a …
Since the end of the second World War Communism has achieved no victory in Latin America as effective as its defeat in Guatemala. The optimistic declarations of diplomats could not help. Nor did legal action undertaken by the Attorney General …
THE PROPHET ARMED (TROTSKY: 1879-1921), by Isaac Deutscher. Oxford University Press, New York. 528 pp. $6. Stalin is “waiting in the wings” as Mr. Deutscher concludes this first half of what is to be a two-volume biography of Leon Trotsky. …
