As a film-maker, Jean-Luc Godard has been uniquely associated with the sensibility of the young; he has given it models to live by and images of at least partial self-approval. From his first and perhaps still his best picture, Breathless, …
This Book deals with the general problem of African development. It contends that “there is no curse on Black Africa,” and it goes on to elucidate the special aspects of African development. The author rightly places blame on the Western …
The title of these notes conveys their tentative nature. To “understand” is not to explain, for explanation presupposes that we can assign casual weights to factors. But understanding—placing an event in the context of other events, past and present, and …
There are two ways to read this book: as an extensive compendium of speculations on alternative futures, and as evidence of the conceptual quicksand upon which such speculations are built. Since, as the authors persuasively argue, futurist speculations will increasingly become …
Bolivia’s recent guerilla episodes, whose protagonists and victims were Che Guevara and Regis Debray, are notable less for their cruelty—to which we have become only too accustomed—than for their chaos and confusion. A gratuitious incoherence permeates all the upheavals in …
It will be many weeks before details are leaked to the world press about the agreement between the Czechs and Russians in early August. No sensible person, remembering Hungary, will feel anything but relief at the thought that the threat of …
Prague, July 15, 1968, seems different from before. While there are more shops and restaurants, more scaffoldings on the old houses in need of restoration, and more cars in the streets, these changes say little. In fact, their insignificance is …
A year ago John Bailey wrote to all county chairmen in the Democratic party informing them that President Johnson was going to be renominated, and that they should ignore those “doubters and cussers” who would “rather be heard than helpful.” With …
Lionel Abel’s “Important Nonsense: Norman 0. Brown” (DISSENT, March-April 1968) proves only that Abel calls “nonsense” anything that won’t squeeze into his preconceptions. Brown’s work just doesn’t fit the squeeze, and so it cannot be fairly described—much less criticized—in Abel’s …
This massive yet gracefully written book is a definitive political history of Europe during the period of the Paris Peace Conference from November• 1918 to June 1919. The work provides a worthy sequel to Mayer’s earlier study, Political Origins of the …
Liberal analysts of the economy leapfrog from one plan for abolishing poverty to another. Currently, the spotlight beams on manpower training and development as the answer to the misery of the urban ghetto and the rural wasteland. The hypothesis here …
Lionel Trilling’s story “Of This Time, Of That Place” begins with a young English professor assigning to his freshman class as their first theme the writing of an essay on “Who I am and Why I came to Dwight College.” The …
By the end of this summer, whether or not the relief missions are successful, the breakaway nation of Biafra and fully a third of its 15 million citizens may both be dead. The political tragedy of this prolonged and agonizing …
First of all I must grant Art Efron something, for there is one matter on which he is partly right—not really right, not meaningfully right, not even half right—but however pointlessly, he is, in any case, partly right. I make …
If some ideas about the possible form of a political opposition in present-day Czechoslovakia give the impression of a desire “to have your cake and eat it, too,” we cannot be surprised. That the more progressive and democratically minded in the …
