Like other minorities, black Americans have a history of their own peculiar sufferings and peculiar experiences, as well as special forms of resistance or of protective evasion. But this history is distinguished from the history of all other minorities in …
Wednesday, the 24th October, was “United Nations Day” when every year one nation provides an artistic entertainment for the delegates. This year, it was the Russians’ turn; since morning the place had been swarming with coat-tailed members of the Leningrad …
I wish to compliment you on the Summer, 1961 issue of DISSENT. It is a constructive, revealing, often startling portrait of a city written by men and women who care about both its present and future. I was especially impressed …
As much as political parties need a myth, they need heroes whom they can look up to. Although democratic socialism takes pride in being rational, it is no exception. A leader with a human face lends personal warmth to the idea; …
Utopia seems deader than a doornail—no better proof than the recent long academic monographs about its history. Yet, the spirit of utopia erupts again and again in the least expected places. While we are sophisticated to the point of scorning …
The name Gröfaz, says Professor Craig in his well-written history of modern Germany, “is ugly enough to belong to some mythical monster, some twisted goblin embodying evil.” It was the anagram of the title “Greatest Fieldmarshall of All Times,” which …
Histories of socialism usually begin with the Old Testament prophets, mighty preachers against usury and “those that buy the poor for silver,” visionaries of a golden age and messengers of perpetual peace. Their god was a god of Justice above …
Professor Kolakowski, originally of Warsaw University and now teaching at All Soul’s, Oxford, first came to the West’s attention in the 1960s as a philosophical spokesman of “revisionism”—the dissident movement of humanist intellectuals inside the Soviet orbit. In his most …
Professor Cuddihy thinks that the tradition of a Judeo-Christian religion is a pious but viciously conceived myth and that the “lachrymose history” of Jewish persecution in the Middle Ages has been invented to conceal the fact that the Jews were …
Motto: “Learn to read and to write so that you may be relieved of labor and become an official with honor. The scribe is a master. His writing pad distinguishes him from the humble oarsman.” —An Egyptian father to his son, about …
Socialism: The Highest Stage of Individualism Socialism strives to abolish exploitation and inequality. It seeks a society where merit and character are the only marks of distinction; where economic resources are controlled by public agencies, themselves under public scrutiny; where …
A political question cannot be answered by a philosophical definition. Leszek Kolakowski has decided, to his own satisfaction, that Communists are Communists are Communists, an insight that he derives from reading their texts. For him, the criteria for their conversion …
In this double biography of Prince Bismarck and his banker, Columbia professor Fritz Stern paints the portrait of an era and tells the story of a grandiose failure—that of the liberal middle class in the new German Reich 100 years …
The History of the German Resistance 1933- 1945, by Peter Hoffmann. Cambridge: MIT Press. 846 pp. The title of this massive volume is a misnomer, and the claim of the jacket, that this is the “essential, surely final handbook on the …
I shall first offer some reflections on the social purposes of the college, then cast a critical look at the liberal and populist responses to the challenge of the mass college, and end with some ideas on higher education in …
Socialist thought provides us with an imaginative and moral horizon.
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