The Role of Ideology  

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 …



Towards Dynamic Barbarism  

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 …



Portraits and Profiles-a Foreword  

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 …





The Professor as Informer  

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 …



Marx as Sociologist  

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. …



What Shall We Do?  

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.



The New Turn in Russia  

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 …



A Great Sociologist  

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 …



Thaw in the Cold War  

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 …



Sects: Lewis Coser Replies  

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 …



Sects and Sectarians  

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 …