A political party, wrote Edmund Burke at the dawn of the nation-state, “is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” This description no …
Professor Baran, says the dust jacket, “is probably the only Marxian social scientist teaching at a large American University.” It ain’t necessarily so; but that the Monthly Review editors should believe it is quite revealing. The book purports to be …
This issue of DISSENT is devoted to reports and interpretations—mostly reports—of the American scene. We have asked a number of writers to describe those aspects of our national life with which they are most familiar. What they wrote, we have …
Punch recently published a cartoon that shows three frightened little men storming into a launching station for guided missiles and shouting, “It’s coming back!” John Foster Dulles must have had similar feelings during the last few months as his whole …
IN EARLY July 1956 James Burnham made his appearance as a government witness at a Department of Justice hearing held as the climax to a six -year-long effort by the Independent Socialist League to have its name removed from the …
KARL MARX, SELECTED WRITINGS IN SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, edited with an introduction and notes by T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel. Watts & Co. London, 1956. 268 pp. 21 s. This book is required reading for all DISSENT readers. …
Among the few successes of DISSENT we count the fact that we have been able in some minor way to establish a link between radicals of an older generation and younger men and women who are untouched and even bored by the rhetoric of the thirties, yet repelled and frightened by the realities of the fifties.
Reading recent interpretations of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, one is inclined to feel that they reveal far less about the character of the changes in Russian politics and society than about the moods …
CONFLICT, by Georg Simmel. Free Press. $3.50. The name of Georg SimmeI is barely known in America, and that only among professional sociologists. This is a pity, since Simmel is one of the handful of eminent European sociological theorists whose …
Two months ago the largest atomic bomb yet tested in the Nevada desert brought sudden sunrise to cities 300 miles away. Only two miles from the center of the explosion a small town had been built with no purpose other …
Geltman’s and Plastrik’s critique of my essay seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding of what a typological procedure aims to accomplish. Social scientists can use concepts which are closely geared to the empirical and historical reality at …
I. The Sociology of the Sect A sect, as the Latin etymology suggests, consists of men who have cut themselves off from the main body of society. They have formed a restricted and closed group which rejects the norms of …
