For over 40 years, ever since Marquis Childs wrote that best-selling book, Sweden has been known as the land of the Middle Way, which was slowly but consistently moving from a backward state toward its present position as the most …
0ne evening last year I waited on a downtown Moscow street corner to meet a friend. It was after 9:00 P.M. and a bitter November wind made me take refuge behind a huge canvas portrait of Lenin, erected for the …
Liberalism Editors: In the Summer 1978 issue Harry Boyte (“Beyond Liberalism: Toward a Living Democracy”) wrote of the “antidemocratic assumptions” and “authoritarian traits” of liberalism. Would he document those statements from the writings of authentic liberals like John Stuart Mill, …
Howard Jarvis stumps the country preaching salvation through lower taxes. One of the country’s best congressmen, Don Fraser, loses to a millionaire convert to the same gospel, and Vice President Mondale travels to his home state to urge his fellow …
The choice confronting California voters in November’s gubernatorial election was between Jarvis hip and Jarvis square. Both unconventional Jerry Brown and bland Evelle Younger, the Republican challenger, ran a campaign of cutbacks each proclaiming his commitment to a constitutional “spending …
Of course, it’s impossible to pinpoint the beginning of Dissent. Probably the idea of a new magazine was mentioned first in early 1953; the first issue is dated January I, 1954. (I recall vividly the moment when the first copy came from the printer.) It …
The Vietnam war was beyond doubt the most demanding test of American foreign policy and its makers since the Second World War. The war in Vietnam was not just another crisis in 30 years of successive crises; it was by …
It’s almost like completing a circle. Dissent marks its 25th Anniversary with an issue featuring articles on the swing to the right in American politics and intellectual life. When we started in 1954, we were polemicizing against a similar trend. …
Few historical judgments appear so unassailable as the almost universal condemnation of the harassment inflicted on Americans accused of Communist sympathies barely a quarter of a century ago. Only a few isolated sectarians on the far right today revere the …
The man whose memory we honor here was 62 years old when he was murdered. He was the same age as Aldo Moro. A coincidence, of course. A more curious coincidence is that both men were kidnapped as they were …
Various euphemisms have attached to the events in the Soviet Union that began in early 1928 and culminated in the frenzy of Stalin’s revolution from above at the end of 1929. Some of these characterizations are scholarly; others, frankly political. …
Why should global poverty concern the affluent? Why do the global poor have a claim on the sympathy, the political energy, and the economic resources of the rich? These questions take on a new urgency as the dimensions of global …
The economist Milton Friedman, best known as the leading American proponent of laissez faire economics, has been a central figure in the recent upsurge of conservative thought. I propose here to criticize the political theory he sets forth in his …
At first glance this is another history of “making it” in America: Robert Schrank, son of immigrant parents, leaves school during the Depression at age 14 to take an unskilled laborer’s job in a furniture factory, and then works his …
This book is Miklos Haraszti’s account of his experiences in 1972 as a machinist in the Red Star tractor factory in Budapest, Hungary. It vividly portrays the degradation of work in what is supposedly a socialist workers’ state.
