To nobody’s surprise, the amiable man of limited educability and his venomous protege won themselves a thumping victory. Ike, the charismatic non-leader, “manifested” himself here and there, brought his magic aura with him, smiled and tranquilized a restive people. While …
One summer day in 1962, I was walking along Boylston Street in Cambridge toward the Charles River. Hearing my name shouted and the honking of a car horn, I turned and saw the two grinning faces of walrus-mustached Phil Luce …
I had begun this introduction as an analysis of the relationship between DISSENT and the times which the articles in this volume both depict and reflect. More or less inevitably, this led to a consideration of the revival of American …
On a murky January day in 1952, after five months of “investigations” by the Military section of the State Security Agency of Hungary, I was brought before a three-member court-martial convoked by the Supreme Military Court of Budapest. No witnesses …
Definitions, whether of liberty or of other political terms, are neither true nor false. They are useful or mischievous, and in any case they change over time. They are useful, ordinarily, when they enable people to communicate, i.e., to understand …
Like many other people, I have been reading the recent literature on the history and politics of Vietnam. It is a depressing experience, which bears out once more de Tocqueville’s remark that “a true but complicated idea has always less …
“Liberty,” Herbert Marcuse writes, “is self-determination, autonomy … But the subject of this autonomy is never the contingent, private individual as that which he actually is or happens to be; it is rather the individual. . . who is capable …
Delano is entirely typical of the innumerable rural towns that dot the vast stretches of farmland in California’s agricultural valleys. Lying off Highway 99, the main artery through the San Joaquin Valley, it is a thoroughly unimpressive-looking place, with some …
The Great Cultural Revolution which vents its ire against capitalistic hairdos, blasphemous traffic lights, Western books, and revisionist street names baffles the old China hands in Moscow, Washington, and even Havana. What is the meaning of these youthful Red Guards …
“The Negro has been the only American who has constantly made an issue of democracy,” wrote Philip Berrigan, S. J. last year. That he did not overstate his case by very much was shown by the Court’s decision obliterating the …
In the late nineteenth century, Marxism was superimposed on an already formidable revolutionary movement in France. Marxism claimed the faith of proletarians and revolutionary intellectuals alike, as the union of theory and practice which the movement required but would not …
The role of SNCC in the so-called Atlanta riots of September, 1966, gives some perspective on the black-power debate. In the first place, “riot” was probably too strong a term by ghetto standards. There was relatively little firebombing and property …
As lonely sectarian politics goes into eclipse and “coalitionism” comes to the fore, it behooves radicals to watch their step. The terrain is tricky and full of traps. One danger is a permanent by-product of the New Deal, the phenomenon …
Those who do not know the name Mihajlov, will have to conjure with it before long. Not since Milovan Djilas, a symbol of much that is best in politics, has a Yugoslav citizen asserted his humanity with such conviction and …
1. The Betrayal of the French Left The Indochina War was, no doubt, one of the great errors of French policy in this century. That is why the question of responsibility for this costly and futile venture will agitate all …
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