Spring 2025

The Political Atmosphere Editors: Irving Howe asks the question, “a new political atmosphere in America?” in the Winter 1959 DISSENT. The responses of the other editors (save perhaps Plastrik) are not encouraging. Mailer didn’t vote, Rosenberg “could care less but …

Professor Alex Inkeles told a group at the University of Michigan that the more often you laugh the higher you are likely to be on the social scale. “Contrary to popular belief,” he said in a lecture, “the lower you …

THE LATE Alvan T. Fuller, businessman and twice Governor of Massachusetts, collected paintings. It is told that in his lifetime Fuller was a very generous man. Earlier this year some fifty of his best pictures hung in a memorial exhibit …

ISLAND IN THE CITY, by Dan Wakefield. Houghton Mifflin Dan Wakefield has written a fine human document about the 600,000 Puerto Ricans in New York City. It is a little on the sentimental side (perhaps in reaction to those who …

THE TRADITION OF THE NEW, by Harold Rosenberg. Horizon, 1959. By a quietly satisfactory law of nature, the brightest people write the best books, if you can get a book out of them. Now a publisher has had the good …

Men and women carry beneath the burden of their impotence a spark of life, however buried, that flares at the sight of the Stranger. And in this blind light they see his strangeness as the mark of a terrifying freedom. …

Dear Irving: No doubt there are others, but I have seen only three “negative” U. S. reviews of my essay, The Causes of World War Three. In the Wall Street Journal, William H. Chamberlain wrote—as expected; in the N. Y. …

I would like to suggest that what most characterizes Leon Trostky, and the revolutionary generation he symbolizes, are: 1) the dominance of ideas; 2) the need and willingness to act on them; and 3) the fanatic belief in ideological purity. …

if some of the more extravagant reviews of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s Sovereignty are to be believed, this book is nothing less than a classic. The London Times Literary Supplement proclaimed it “a remarkable achievement . . . a great work …

A major legend of Soviet ideology has it that the rule over production in the USSR is qualitatively different from that of private capitalism. In Factory and Manager in the U.S.S.R., Professor Joseph Berliner of Syracuse University has written a …

One of the more ironic incidents in the history of economic thought was the development of a theory of socialism utilizing the very ideas employed to attack Marx. Dismayed by the sharply critical turn he had given to classicism, economists …

When the recession came to Michigan, it did not create a sudden crisis as much as bring to a climax socio-economic trends that had been gathering for some years. In 1958 unemployment in Michigan reached a peak of 460,000 or …

In recent years there has arisen a sophistication which understands that the abolition of private property alone will not guarantee the end of exploitation. The problem has been posed as: how does one check bureaucracy. The problem is a real …

Traditionally Marxism has claimed to be a carrier of progress beyond the attainment of capitalism. The argument ran: Capitalism, having reached its summit, is weighed down with internal contradictions. At this point, the proletariat, matured by long apprenticeship in capitalist …