Spring 2025

Young people today have no spokesmen. The day of the youth league and its ideology seems to be over. Today we have the club again, and the gang, and perhaps the family. It might even be wrong to say that …

it is believed in New York that Puerto-Rican immigration is one of the main causes of the city’s rapidly increasing juvenile delinquency. In London, a similar social phenomenon has been attributed, at various times and in various neighborhoods, to the …

Many students today are more interested in examples to follow than ideas to promote. They look for styles of life that will allow them the substance or illusion of personality. They search for external marks that may validate a hoped-for …

Whatever its deficiencies, the younger generation has not suffered from a lack of labels. The era has been called shook-up and apathetic; white-collared and black-leather-jacketed; organized and uncommitted. But in all this generation-labeling perhaps the largest and most important segment …

If there is to be an American political left in the 1960s and 70s it will be led, for the most part, by radical students of today and tomorrow, rather than by those who received their political training in the …

In the last decade or so the American university has been put to unprecedented use by industry, the mass media and research teams, as well as by intellectuals who find it a handy home base. One result has been a …

Growing up as a human being, a “human nature” assimilates a culture, just as other animals grow up in strength and habits in their appropriated environments, that complete their natures. Present-day sociologists and anthropologists don’t talk much about this process, …

Durham, North Carolina is probably a town like many others; I doubt that ordinarily I would have found it unfamiliar. I saw it, however, only at night and carried away only two memories. The…

ONE OF THE MORE interesting political events of the past few months was passed over in virtual silence by the American press: the decision of Pierre Mendel-France, former premier of France, to join the Autonomous Socialist Party. For an appreciation …

Bedazzled by the way in which the American economy successfully handled three post-war recessions, many observers have concluded that prosperity is now normal and routine, built-in to the system. Not only has the economy become less susceptible, they say, to …

No one has argued the omnipresence of the law of supply and demand more persuasively than businessmen themselves—spokesmen for the steel industry not excluded. It is therefore ironic that steel succeeded last summer in accomplishing what had been denied as …

“The whole bourgeois world blown up by gunpowder, when the smoke disperses and reveals the ruins, will start again with different variations—another bourgeois world.” It was these words of Alexander Herzen that occurred to me when I recently finished reading …

There is a strong temptation to make the best of British Labor’s defeat. After all, the popular vote shows a Tory margin of only 1½ million votes out of 30 million and a careful breakdown indicates that, within many electoral …

Puerto Ricans and Sentimentality Editors: I suppose if one were to total up the comments of Stanley Plastrik in his review of my book, Island in the City, [DISSENT, Spring 1959], the scales would be slightly more weighted on the …