Fall 2025

Editors: There are now two political prisoners behind bars in New Hampshire. On June 28, Hugo De Gregory was jailed for refusing to answer questions in New Hampshire’s “subversive investigation.” His imprisonment climaxes six years of persecution by N. H. …

THE RECENT FAILURE to abolish the death penalty in California by initiative petition reveals something about liberal politics today. In February 1960, there seemed to be an excellent chance of repealing the state’s capital punishment law. Governor Edmund Brown had …

THE BEAT OF LIFE, by Barbara Probst Solomon. Lippincott & Co. With sympathy and honesty, Barbara Probst Solomon has written a book about her own generation. In The Beat of Life the “beat” and the “silent” young are not being …

GROWING Ur ABSURD, by Paul Goodman. Random House. In the notices it has received thus far, Paul Goodman’s remarkable book, Growing Up Absurd, has not been done the decency of a summary. My main intention in this review is to …

At about 7:80 on the evening of June 27, 1960, in a tiny book-crammed lodging of a workers’ suburb of Paris, Pierre Monatte died. He was seventy-nine years old. Monatte entered the union movement in 1902, having been attracted to …

In logic, as in common sense, we understand that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. No man can meet himself coming around a corner; nor can he serve, much as it might amuse him …

I agree with much of what Dennis Wrong says in his “Reflections on the End of Ideology,” in the Summer 1960 issue of DISSENT. Mr. Wrong writes that the “end of ideology” is a fear of the “destructive mass emotions …

Communication in and about daily performances, relationships, arrangements is ordinarily “non-controversial”: it takes things for granted. The world is established, and one has to put up with it; the common projects and aspirations do not essentially question it and do …

In 1956, Juan Jose Arevalo, revolutionary and President of Guatemala from 1945-1950, published a book with the title Fable of the Shark and the Sardines. Into the book, written after the subversion of the left-wing government of Guatemala by American-armed …

The nineteenth-century Cuban struggle for independence was long and bloody. Repeatedly the Cuban rebels asked the U.S. government to grant them belligerent status against Spain, but at no time, neither in the Ten Years’ War (1868-1878), nor in the War …

More and more the drug addict is becoming both an avant-garde hero and modern scapegoat. The writing of Jack Gelber, William Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi and others has stimulated interest in the lives of “junkies.” Hipsters, according to Norman Mailer, may …

It isn’t easy to return to India after a twenty-year absence. So much has happened and so much changed. There is a whole new generation that has known freedom since 1947. What will it be like? Will one find the …

The British Labor movement has always been favored, or goaded, by a left wing which felt that Labor lacked full socialist consciousness; in the last decade or two this left wing found popular expression through the oratory of Nye Bevan …