THE STAGES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH, by W. W. Rostow. A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge University Press. A pretentious title leads to a pretentious foreword, which leads to a very unpretentious introduction in which the author disclaims what he is doing. Having …
BEYOND THE WELFARE STATE, by Gunnar Myrdal. Yale University Press: 1960. One of the more curious things about the teaching of economics these days is the sharp and often vitriolic attack on planning. All too often the idea that careful …
SOCIAL MOBILITY IN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, by Seymour Lipset and Reinhard Bendix. University of California Press. 1959. Thanks mainly to the foundations, the empirical study of social stratification and mobility has expanded enormously in the past decade. Research teams have been …
Editors: In the Summer 1960 issue, on p. 813, you introduce a writer as a “professional student of American military affairs.” I wonder about this “student’s” qualifications. Everyone should know that defensive weapons cannot be distinguished from offensive weapons. To …
Scarcely twenty years ago the capitalist system was, to all appearances, disintegrating—in England its symbol was Jarrow, “the town that was murdered,” its representative figure Montagu Norman, the sinister governor of the Bank of England who engineered the rise of …
One fourth of the American people is poor or lives at the margin of poverty. The poverty from which they suffer is not a “case” problem, amenable to solution by social work, nor does it occur merely in “pockets” which …
The essay which follows was written in the Soviet Union and sent by its author through friends to Paris, asking that it be published. It came out first in 1959, in a French translation, in the Paris monthly Esprit. We …
1. Disillusionment with the idea of revolution is one of the most interesting features of American intellectual life today. Since revolution was never a practical possibility in America, this disillusionment might seem as unimportant as the enthusiasm preceding it. What …
Only an extraordinarily prescient observer could have predicted the revival of the American pacifist movement in the fifties. Shattered by the international crisis of the late thirties, pacifism had become by 1941 an intellectually bankrupt, morally compromised appendage to America …
Like other dissenters, I can go along with a number of the specific proposals of the major party platforms (particularly the Democratic document) for meeting the domestic needs of the Sixties. But socialists and radicals, it seems to me, must …
Mid-Twentieth Century America is an amazingly prosperous land—indeed, the wealthiest nation in the world. Yet in the midst of great plenty are two million people comparable in their destitution to feudal serfs, save that they are bound to no land. …
The phrase “the end of ideology” is becoming a catchword which sums up a major tendency of our time. Daniel Bell chose it as the title for his recently published collection of essays on American politics and culture. Edward Shils …
An editorial in the April, 1960 issue of Socialist Comentary begins as follows: It would be stupid to deny that demoralization has overtaken the Labor Party since the election. What could be more depressing than the contrast between the position …
Anything as bad a TV must be susceptible to some improvement, but the one sure way of not getting it is to make the programs more “cultural.” The TV chains and the FCC are momentarily nervous, and so they chatter …
