Spring 2025

On Mass Culture Editor: More power to “high culture,” by all means, but is Bernard Rosenberg’s cri de coeur really likely to contribute to the worthy cause he espouses?

Given the immediacy of war and starvation, it is tempting to regard the Nigerian conflict as a mere calamity, without considering causes. But this bloody African conflict must be the subject of historical contemplation as well as humanitarian response: we …

When four years of Republican rule end in January 1973, the United States of America is likely to be even more tom by internal crisis than it was in the last, shambling days of Lyndon Johnson’s Administration. I write this prediction …

Whatever the initiators of the Cultural Revolution had in mind when they launched it, they must have expected to carry it further than it has gone, for the present situation shows all the signs of an unfinished job. On the …

There is widespread agreement that lasting peace in Vietnam will require some sort of international presence to supervise the truce and lead to impartial control of the hoped-for free elections. Uncensored reports from South Vietnam stress the overwhelming war-weariness of …

First an admission of error, and then a few analytical notes. A few weeks before the Presidential election I began to recognize that I very much wanted Nixon defeated. That could only mean, Humphrey elected. I had written in Dissent that I …

Post-election wisdom is about as good as pre-election wisdom. Still, here goes: The old coalition is dead, long live the new! This seems to me the main point of the election results. True, in the last hours of the election, the …

Of course, one wishes that the 1968 New York teachers’ strike had not happened. The social fabric of the city was severely tried and suffered grievous wounds. Reconciliation is to be hoped for, but I fear it is unlikely, pretty …

The distinction between the commitment of the engaged writer and the outcry of the enraged writer is not merely verbal. Engaged literature—the term is reminiscent of numerous, now dated discussions among French intellectuals in the early postwar years, particularly of …

We were accustomed to seeing the Communists and their friends in every country of the world quickly forget the “errors,” even the “crimes,” of the Soviet Union, attributing them sometimes to “capitalist encirclement,” sometimes to the “cult of personality.” But it …

Not only the East has its revisionists. In this country, too, and even more insistently in Western Europe, honest research has led to a thorough and often painful re-appraisal of recent history. The conventional view of the so-called Cold War, …

In Chicago, Allen Ginsberg declared that the 35th National Democratic Convention was a mass hallucination. Maybe he is right, and the whole thing never happened. His account should be interesting; Jean Genet’s more so; and Norman Mailer will have much …

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber belongs to that small but influential group on the democratic Left in France which regards technological innovation as a key to a more progressive social order in Europe. These men pride themselves on their pragmatism, their lack of dogma …

The story of Czechoslovakia has meaning far beyond the suffering and hopes of its 14 million people. Its establishment in 1918 was a tribute to aspirations for national self-determination and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Its betrayal by the …

If books about the university continue to appear at the present rate, we may have to establish one of those new interdisciplinary fields that many of their authors favor—academiology: the study of higher education and its pedagogical, philosophical, social, and …