THE POLITICS OF MASS SOCIETY, by William Kornhauser. Free Press. 1959. Of all the words employed by Socialists, Sociologists, Liberals, Political Scientists, Writers and Literary Critics, none has been so abused as the word “mass.” Whether it has been applied …
THE ECLIPSE OF COMMUNITY, by Maurice R. Stein. Princeton University Press. 1960. The Eclipse of Community is a reasoned manual of important American community studies of the past fifty years. One of its great merits is how it implicitly tells …
CRUSADER WITHOUT VIOLENCE, by L. D. Reddick. Harper. This book, by an occasional contributor to DISSENT, is a biography of Martin Luther King, the Negro minister who led the bus boycott in Montgomery and has since become one of the …
TUESDAY, May 3rd, was one of those lovely Spring days in New York: the Yanks were playing Detroit and the trees in City Hall Park were putting out new leaves. Yet before the day was over, Civil Defense officials were …
PEACETIME SPYING is politically hazardous. It affects national attitudes in much the same way that the peeping tom affects the neighborhood. Invasions of privacy prompt indignation. They make for anger and desperate unreasonableness. That is why the big blunder with …
Sons and daughters of the soil, on Monday, 21st March, 1960, we launch our Positive Decisive Action against the Pass Laws. Exactly 7 a.m. we launch. Oh, yes, we launch—there is no doubt about it. (ALL OVER.) We have reached …
If a cartoonist wished to exhibit the essentials of the current racial war in Alabama, he would only have to picture the actual scene that took place Tuesday morning, March 8, 1960, at the intersection of Thurman and Jackson streets …
Editors: It is hard to believe that a more incorrect impression as to the state of opinion in the British Labor Party could be created than that produced by Stanley Plastrik in the Winter 1960 DISSENT. Nationalization is presented as …
Sunday, March 6, 1960 dawned clear and cold in Montgomery, Alabama. It was like any other quiet Sunday morning, yet a feeling of unrest pierced the deceptive calm. Two days before, the Negro ministers of the city had scheduled a …
The sit-in demonstrations begun by four A. and T. College freshmen in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, had greater effect on the students of Alabama State College than most of us realized. Students here, as in other colleges, …
“The first act has come off very well, but who is going to write the second?” A local realtor addressed this question to the assembled “Central Committee” of the student movement in a large Southern city. The Negro businessman had …
A man is dead: you think of his living face, of his gestures, his actions, and of moments you shared, trying to recapture an image that is dissolved forever. A writer is dead: you reflect upon his work, upon each …
In the new states [in Asia, Africa and the Middle East]. one after another, the very groundwork we are discussing [representative government and public liberties] is in danger of being destroyed. There is another difficulty. Though all of us seem …
Ever since Francis Bacon in The Wisdom of the Ancients revised the earliest myths of the race in order to make man over, it has been a habit of the modern mind to interpret actions in the form of myth. …
