It is a bitter fact concerning our time that a scientific development so remarkable as the launching of sputnik should have evoked responses of fear and dread. Let us be candid: these were responses shared by all honest and sensitive …
Ideas change but their formulas remain. Two people a thousand years apart may be of the same mind though they strove for different things; on the other hand, no bore is more boring than the disciple who quotes what I …
Every political theory which does not recognize the autonomy of politics vis a vis socio-economic history rejects out of hand the following propositions: that the problem of political power in a socialist economy is not fundamentally different from the same …
The boundless power of the party machine over public life is constantly being confirmed; in private conversation and on the printed page we return to this problem in the weary tones of recrimination and impotence. Is there any point, we …
The German election this past fall followed a pattern that had already been set four years earlier. Then, as now, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) entered a national election with some reason for hope. During the last four years it …
In the last year or so, theory has become news. The debate over the character of the changes taking place in Russian society has been carried on, not merely by a few radical intellectuals, but by government officials, newspapermen, indeed …
Each generation sees history through lenses ground by its own experience. In these days of recoil from radical involvement it is hardly surprising that reinterpretations of just those phases of Western history in which the radical impulse was strongest have …
THE MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST, by Dwight Macdonald. Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy This book, as a book, doesn’t add much to the wealth of nations. It is foolishly inconsistent, not often thought-provoking, not informative (except perhaps to the young who …
In his review of Milovan Djilas’ New Class, [DISSENT, Fall 1957] Norman Thomas necessarily had to stress the general and very powerful job of debunking which this book has performed. But there is one problem touched upon by Djilas which …
Suppose one were to pose the question: why is anxiety so endemic to our current national life? The most likely response would be a supercilious shrug: naturally, anxiety must be the common state of those who have lived through upheaval, …
Baran’s Book Editors: Lewis Coser’s review of Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth is tendentious, misleading, and sciolistic. I say this only after re-reading both Coser’s review and Baran’s book. Invective may be invigorating; it is not a substitute for …
When the state has to exercise its monopoly on the instruments of physical violence it is symptomatic of either a breakdown or a weakening of authority. This applies to Little Rock as well as Budapest. Little Rock, of course, is …
The economic upswing of the past ten to twelve years has come to an end. Full employment, prevalent for most of this period, is now in jeopardy. Though enjoined by law to maintain full employment, the government has deliberately abetted …
Mass Culture, compiled by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, is the first book that has ever tempted me to apply the reviewer’s cliche, “definitive.” The theoretical, historical, statistical, cultural, anthropological, depth-analytical, polemical, prophetical articles in it on TV, the …
Our concern is not to undertake a theoretical analysis of socialism in the abstract but rather to understand what socialism should be for us, at this time, in our Western civilization. Hence I raise the question: Is socialism primarily the …
