A Revival Of Radicalism?

How many readers can recall the intellectual atmosphere in this country at the time Dissent started publishing, almost a decade ago? It was a moment of retreat, even rout. A good many intellectuals formerly of the left were engaged in a flight to conservatism which proved as ungainly as it was premature. Seriously entertained, conservatism can be a respectable point of view; but the sour hostility toward their own past, the frantic pursuit of political “novelties” that a century earlier had become the merest commonplaces of European reaction, the barely-disguised contempt for freedom which certain ex-radicals displayed in their devotion to the Cold War—all this was a good deal worse than conservatism.

It bears...