Fall 2025

THE STUDY OF HISTORY is under attack today on many fronts, both from within and without the historical profession. Where free choice replaces a required curriculum, students increasingly desert the study of Western civilization for the sociology and psychology courses …

IN 1959, THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATS adopted a new program. At the same time, the British Labour party also adopted a new program. Each of the two was trying to shed the image of a Marxist workers’ party and to …

Last summer Michael Walzer began writing some notes on the problems of “citizens politics”—that is, the kinds of local groups, some tenacious and others short-lived, that have grown up throughout the country during the last few years. Naturally enough, his …

IN INDIA, we have exhausted our exclamatory diction in describing the triumph of Mrs. Gandhi in the recent elections. So I will simply say it has been the greatest ever—quantitatively as good as Nehru’s, qualitatively better still. She had been …

RONALD LAING MUST BE ACCOUNTED one of the main contributors to the theoretical and rhetorical armory of the contemporary Left. By the contemporary Left is meant that soft variant of the utopian urge which has jettisoned the Marx of Capital …

THESE ARE REBELLIOUS DAYS, the kind of days in which we tend to become polarized about law. Some stridently emphasize the need for respect; others stridently express their contempt. This contempt has come in our society from both the Right …

WHEN HE SPEAKS against kitsch he seems to be speaking from the point of view of art,” wrote Harold Rosenberg, describing the stance of a certain well-practiced critic of mass culture; but “when he speaks about art it is plain …

PATRICIA SEXTON’S CLAIM in the February 1971 DISSENT article “Women Debate the Equal Rights Amendment” that “the vulnerable woman down at the bottom of the job ladder” will in the long run be pulled up by the Equal Rights Amendment is …

IN AN ESSAY I wrote a while back, “The Hippies as Contrameritocracy,” (DISSENT, July—August 1969), I argued that the movement was essentially a response to meritocratic pressures bearing down not only upon youth but upon the society as a whole, …

He commanded respect, despite his old-fashioned and dirty appearance. The principal personages of Cuzco greeted him seriously. It was uncomfortable to walk with him because he kneeled down before all the churches and chapels and ostentatiously took off his hat …

WLADYSLAW GOMLJLKA’S SON told me in 1957: “Only fools can believe that there are differences in theory or ideology in the Party. The only differences are purely personal; it is merely a struggle to have one’s hand in the till. …

Author of German Catholics and Hitler’s War, Gordon Zahn teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He has long been active in the peace movement. The article below first appeared in the Catholic World and is reprinted with the …