THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS

...Elsewhere the scene scarcely appears brighter...

...It was correct—and early in the day: see "Last Chance in Vietnam," Summer 1964--.on Vietnam...

...In their pages writers can fire away: attacking what seems inhuman to them, defending what they value that elsewhere goes undefended or even unconsidered, shaping and nourishing their dreams of a better life...

...It's colder than socialism here in New York," E. E. Cummings once wrote in a letter to a friend, and anyone who is not a committed socialist can instantly recognize and smile at the joke...

...Intellectuals who edit and write for magazines that reach small audiences seem to heed the solace—or is it self-justification— that their efforts "count" in the world...

...Socialism was for many among them the name of their dream...

...to dissent from the support of the status quo now so noticeable on the 156 JOSEPH EPSTEIN part of many former radicals and socialists...

...And in the magazine's correspondence columns, one of the zaniest bits of polemic—brilliant and witty and as intensely personal as any that has perhaps been printed -anywhere—appeared, a marvelous three-cornered affair between Paul Goodman (who in a review accused Dwight Macdonald of being "our best journalist"), Macdonald (who came back to recall, among other things, that Goodman had once told him he could demonstrate the quality of poems scientifically—a method that served to prove that his, Goodman's, poems were excellent), and Harold Rosenberg (who, attacked by Macdonald as being pontifical— "Harold XII" was the sobriquet employed— rejoined by remarking that he would gladly straighten Macdonald out, "though what good it would do to convince a man who has been convinced and unconvinced so often I don't know") . Ripping, slashing stuff— amusing intellectual high jinks...

...As pure journalism, "The White Negro" was champagne...

...It has now been dropped, but for the longer part of its life Dissent was subtitled "A Quarterly of Socialist Opinion," and socialism has in fact been more than an appendage to the magazine...

...Some former contributors have gone the way of national selfhatred that goes by the unsatisfactory name of anti-Americanism...

...As such, socialism remains an aspiration...

...Are the magazine's editors cursed with the hex of perpetual middleage...

...Keeping in mind the period we have just come through, merely to name these principles— an adherence to democratic methods, an opposition to violence as a means to political ends, and a commitment to reasoned discourse— is to highlight the nature of the predicament...

...Nor, one might add, are there any stellar examples of socialism at work in the world today...

...It was correct on civil rights, deploring separatism, and maintaining the -rgument, enunciated in its pages by Bayaid Rustin, that federal help on a large scale was needed for the Negro but not the Negro :.:one...

...Joseph R. McCarthy was still on the loose...

...yet it is interesting to speculate upon what Wright might have contributed once the civil rights movement of the sixties got underway in earnest, had he not died at a premature fifty-two in 1960...

...Seeking a review of our twenty years of existence that would be neither encomium nor assault, but instead a considered and critical judgment, the editors of Dissent invited the writer Joseph Epstein to put down his opinions about and reactions to the magazine...

...Apart from its bread-and-butter contributors, Dissent has also served as a home to the stray dissenting essay that could not find a home elsewhere...

...Has it been marching not merely to a different drummer but instead doing a parochial polka to an accordion player that only it can hear...

...The magazine did not view itself operating outside the realm of ideas, though ideas, as its founding editors well knew, had interesting ways of slipping off the page and out into the world...

...where others had visions, he insisted upon, and brought along, blueprints...

...THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS 159 Defections to death have taken a more serious toll...

...The reasons behind this flourishing state of intellectual journalism are not easily fathomed...

...But do intellectual magazines with their puny circulation figures truly alter the direction of the world...

...to dissent from theterrible assumption that a new war is necessary or inevitable, and that the only way to defeat Stalinism is through atomic world suicide...

...Aside from its politics, if any journalistic criticism might be made of the Public Interest it is THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS 155 that its content as often as not does not seem in the general intellectual interest...

...That he could not bring himself to risk losing a scoop is no excuse whatever...

...and sometimes at least as diverted by subjects or issues that turned out to be of only passing interest...

...Too certain a commitment or too sure a view of socialism might edge the magazine over into dogmatism, and divert it from intellectual main purposes—the main purposes, or core, of the intellectual, as Richard Hofstadter once put it, being "the search for new certainties," which implies a dissatisfaction with the old ones...

...Cold War intellectuals not noted for their calm could be driven to hysteria by Dissent...

...Or is the entire question of capturing the interest of a youthful following a foolish one—a question of a kind that would only be asked in a country preternaturally concerned about the young...

...Even the Central Intelligence Agency testified to the belief in the efficacy of intellectual magazines, if not to its own efficiency as a sub rosa organization, when a few years back it was caught slipping cash into the tills of various journals of modest circulation but wide influence both in America and abroad...

...he should have expressed in print his objections to the passage in which Mailer discusses the morality of beating up a fiftyyearold storekeeper...

...By now it is almost a tradition in intellectual journalism that the smaller the magazine the larger its claims, the less its resources the more boisterous its tone...

...The ironies here were manifold...

...It might serve as the acid test to determine whether a person is an intellectual or not to ask if he ever wished to own or edit a magazine...

...One can believe all these things and more besides, yet when pressed it is also difficult to dispute that Russian wheat deals, a man named Bull Connor, and a president from Texas with a huge ego and an eye on history didn't count for more in the three areas mentioned above than all the intellectuals in the nation...

...Onto the scene entered Dissent—a new and argumentative voice...

...The White Negro" is the piece in question, a composition of key importance in Mailer's development and, it does not seem preposterous to suggest, one that may have had a shaping responsibility for some of the more mindless activism of the sixties—a time when the word "existential" covered actions more accurately described as irrational or antisocial...

...The values were those of the Left and the outlook critical of the status quo...

...Acclaim is one thing, readership another, and in time Dissent built up a steady, if less than teeming, circulation...

...its value as an intellectual weapon, apart from Marxism, appears less clear...

...Once underway, the magazine proved mainly on target on the chief issues and events of its time...

...For most editors, perhaps the third and fourth motives would outweigh the first two, though, as with Orwell's writing, doubtless all four would come into play...

...Ten years ago, on the occasion in fact of Dissent's tenth anniversary, Irving Howe,toting up credits of accomplishment and debits of disappointment, noted on the debit side: "We have not, to be sure, reconstructed that new synthesis of socialist thought which we had fondly, indeed naively, hoped to reach...

...At best, the magazine figured to fall out of fashion...

...Nicola Chiaromonte, on the subject of the crisis of socialism, wisely wrote that "confidence in socialism implies confidence in a more general principle"—that principle being, to put it roughly, a belief in progress...

...In retrospect, the 1950s were rather a fine time for intellectual journalism generally...

...Each made special contributions to the magazine, but in its early years Mills especially lent Dissent's pages the broad-pax of his intellectual 'boldness...

...The example, though, is instructive...

...For some it was nowhere near radical enough, too often 158 JOSEPH EPSTEIN seeming politically amorphous and on too many large issues being without a clear line...

...From its American stream came a battery of writers trained for the most part in the New York playgrounds of sectarian Left politics—men with switch-blade minds ready, when it came to political argument, to slash out for the jugular...

...by Dwight Macdonald that had originally been commissioned and rejected by Encounter and another entitled "Reflections on Little Rock" by Hannah Arendt that was, in Miss Arendt's words, written upon the suggestion of Commentary but was "at variance with the magazine's stand on matters of discrimination and segregation...

...Ten years later, it is doubtful that any among Dissent's editors will have claimed to have done so since...

...Henry Luce thought to comfort himself and his employees at Time-Life, Inc., by remarking to the assembled faithful: "All our publications, all our activities, are successful...

...How rich a vein of radical writing one need only skim -through the early years' issues of Dissent to discover...

...In the United States the past ten or so years have not on the whole been high or happy ones for intellectual journalism...

...Youth has been wrong much more often than it has been right, and to have youth on one's side can be construed less as a sign of distinction than as a need for self-examination...

...But is the tension between the two, frequently found in the same writer, finally creative or dampening...

...This is -a considerable consolation for our efforts over the years" By such standards Dissent not merely fails but scarcely exists...

...In Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter remarked upon the component of playfulness in the makeup of intellectuals...

...It was first among American journals onto the work of the Polish writer Kolakowski...

...Milovan Djilas, too, was a figure whose cause and case came up more than once over the years...

...The late Philip Rahv attempted to reincarnate the old Partisan Review, of which he had been a principal editor, in Modern Occasions...

...False starts and sad slides have tended to predominate...

...The effect is as observable in politics as in theology: the intellectual function can be overwhelmed by an excess of piety expended within too contracted a frame of reference As it stands, there is a tension in Dissent between its socialism and its intellectuality...

...the socialist side asks optimistically, but in time the intellectual side will find it heavily polluted...

...Would things look any different if the magazine had never come into being...

...For himself, Orwell said that the first three outweighed the fourth motive...

...He who answers no, whatever else he may be, including an artist, statesman, scientist, or genius, is most probably no intellectual...

...Orwell's four motives were : (1) ego, (2) aesthetic pleasure, (3) historical impulse, or the desire "to see 154 things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity," and (4) to alter the direction of the world...

...Of sad slides perhaps none has been sadder or more steeply downhill than that undertaken by the once-towering Partisan Review...

...A decisive and useful literary critic, in politics Rahv was a radical trimmer, and his new magazine, after a brief life, exnired, a casualty to foggy political purpose...

...at worst, out of existence...

...They are successful not only at the box office, but they are successful also in the opinion of a large part of mankind...

...Louis and the Catholic Worker movement came Michael Harrington, who, a bit younger than most of the men who founded Dissent, later confessed that his first reaction to the magazine was that in forming it its editors were "selling out...

...But can socialists...

...With his customary broad brushstrokes, C. Wright Mills painted in the picture: among political intellectuals, he wrote, "there is no demand and no dissent, and no opposition to the monstrous decisions that are being made without deep or widespread debate, in fact with no debate at all...

...It has not solved the crisis of socialism, which is of a larger order than a quarterly journal is likely to be able to deal with...

...Less than two decades before, in the Winter of 1954, Dissent had come into being, born because its founding editors felt the current atmosphere one of intellectual stagnation and extreme political timidity...

...One of the lessons the past decade taught was that one could not have it both ways: one could not, that is, be both with-it and honorable at the same time...

...Now that intellectuals could be said to be with the show, embourgeoised by the nation's prosperity, "the idea of socialism, whether in its revolutionary or democratic reference, has virtually ceased to figure in current intellectual debate...

...The difference between them, one has to conclude, is a matter of faith...

...Certainly, no one connected with Dissent would wish to claim that the magazine has helped revive socialism in America...

...Mailer wrote what is surely the most widely discussed single piece ever to appear in Dissent...

...Or of Lionel Abel, also long a contributing editor, who wrote a good deal for the magazine on political and cultural matters...

...In the modern era, in most places at most times, that rostrum has been a magazine...

...and still others thought it old-hat, the stuff of the 1930s, giving off too strong a whiff of the sectarian Left life of the Depression in New York...

...Judged by these terms, Dissent's twentieth anniversary proves an occasion for congratulation...

...the magazine was, for them, at least in part in the way of a substitute for that movement, a voice of socialist values...

...Since Dissent's inception, Norman Thomas and A. J. Muste, the two elder statesmen of that particular strand of the radical Left that the magazine saw (and continues to see) itself representing, have died, and passed from the scene without anything resembling replacements yet arising...

...Closer to the issue-by-issue life of the magazine, among contributing editors and major contributors, C. Wright Mills, Richard Wright, Harvey Swados, Paul Goodman, Ben B. Seligman, and Nicola Chiaromonte are all dead...

...As a group, then, the founders of Dissent were independent radicals—"a collectivity of individualists," as one of them later labeled the group—who shared common values and a common outlook, if not necessarily a commonality of specific political doctrine...

...The question leads directly into another question: How good, how successful, has Dissent been...

...The publication in the West of Dr...

...This seems unlikely, for Dissent has been on target at least as much as other journals...

...To face down the hurricane, not to be swept up by the swirl of hip and hot ideas of the moment, carries its cost...

...Has the magazine simply been out of it, missing the main issues or coming down wrongly on the important ones among them...

...Here, exactly as he has submitted it, is his assessment...

...Epstein, who in this piece describes himself as "a liberal nonsocialist," agreed to write the article...

...In another piece, Irving Howe slipped into a parody of Henry Adams to register disgust at the heavy-handedly antilibertarian legislation against the American Communist party ("One word kept coursing through his mind and rubbing against his nerves, bringing fever to his fingertips...

...In the early 1960s, for example, both Staughton Lynd and John P. Roche were welcome to, and evidently felt comfortable in, Dissent's pages, whereas today, so far afield have the two men journeyed politically in their different directions since that time, the appearance of either in the magazine seems indeed very far from likely...

...The world may have its uses for intellectual magazines, but the chief justification for these magazines is not what the world makes of them but the quality of thought that goes THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS 163 into them...

...Viewing the same period, C. Wright Mills, in the gruff prose style characteristic of his writing in the 1950s, saw on the one hand "a decayed and frightened liberalism" and on the other "the insecure and ruthless fury of political gangsters...

...On a less dramatic level, the effect on nearly an entire generation of a now mature professoriat that grew up on the diet of modernism in literature and radicalism in politics served up by Partisan Review is incalculable but clearly considerable...

...The socialism wants youth on its side, the intellectuality refuses to pay the price in forgoing principles involved in proselytizing...

...If success at the box office is to be discounted, what of correctness of opinion...

...But in the main, over the first two decades of its existence Dissent--deriving its principles from a hatred of exploitation and a hunger for justice—said No, and in the main the magazine appears to have been right to have done so...

...It was correct in excoriating the self-indulgences and irresponsibilities of the New Left (which, in retrospect, seems to have been comprised exclusively of self-indulgences and irresponsibilities...

...In the Howe and Coser essay "Images of Socialism," :socialism was viewed not as the "pursuit of happiness but the enlargement of freedom...

...From Texas came C. Wright Mills, from Brooklyn Norman Mailer, from St...

...Their approach to socialism, they have always claimed, is not as to a fixed piety and their concentration has been on the "problematics" of the subject...

...In the main it was how to remain Left without deserting first principles...

...In part, much of it has to do with the generation now in its fifties and sixties, who was then in its thi' ies and forties...

...Within this tradition, Dissent's opening salvo, "A Word to Our Readers," was reasonably modest and carefully measured: The purpose of this new magazine is suggested by its name: to dissent from the bleak atmosphere of conformism that pervades the political and intellectual life of the United States...

...Dissent's editors themselves, while insisting on their socialism, have tended to wear it lightly...

...Irving Howe was once badly burned by Ralph Ellison for a piece in Dissent insisting that protest be the main strain in contemporary fiction by American Negro writers...

...Formerly the most stirring of the American intellectual magazines, during this period it lost its bearings (and with them its standards), hit the skids, and went bounding off in hot pursuit of youth both in its politics and its literary tastes...

...A liberal, nonsocialist intellectual attempting to understand a socialist is a bit in the position of a secularized or agnostic Jew attempting to understand an Orthodox Jew...

...Herzen's journal the Bell is frequently credited with being as influential as any other element in the decision to free the serfs...

...The question isn't any longer even open to argument...

...An early piece, a commentary on a piece by Sidney Hook on an imagined visit to Karl Marx, suggested that if Marx came around on the subject of social value, "Hook may go so far as to propose him for membership in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom...

...Didacticism is the mainspring of prose," Osip Mandelstam wrote, "and therefore a prose writer needs a rostrum...

...some others have joined the caravan of American politics,' serving in the age-old capacity of the intellectual whose task it is to justify power...

...As for immediate goals and promises, the editors ended with the claim that they had raised sufficient funds to honor the one-year subscriptions they were soliciting...

...The magazine published the first English translation of "On Socialist Realism" by Abram Tertz, the pen name as is now known of Andrei Sinyaysky...

...From Europe the magazine ran, among others, Ignazio Silone, Czeslaw Milosz, Nicola Chiaromonte, Leszek Kolakowski, George Lichtheim, and Herbert Marcuse—men who had seen at first-hand, and often been directly victimized by, the tumultous events of recent history...

...Over these same years the magazine also built up a corps of regular contributors, whose spread in age has extended from veterans of the Austrian Socialist party to undergraduates at Yale...

...While one need not be a socialist to write for or take pleasure in reading Dissent, socialism nonetheless gives the magazine its particular quality and is inextricably bound up with its weaknesses as well as with its strengths...

...The word was, shame...

...Chastened by the revelations about Stalinism, one of the editors of Partisan Review noted, "American democracy looks like the real thing to the intellectuals...

...Not at the moment, nor possibly ever in its two decades, has Dissent been attractive to young people in large numbers...

...Consider the magazine's predicament...

...In its first decade of existence, to cite two examples, it ran an essay entitled "America...

...He is the author of Divorced in America (1974...

...The socialist side ardently wishes a revival of radicalism, the intellectual side mounts a furious artillery attack on the New Left...

...Yet what does it gain a man, or a magazine, to be correct if the world comes tumbling down around him...

...One can find issues where the case for correctness either doesn't exist or is a good deal less clear...

...Soon the magazine was running pieces approving of riots, urging draft resistance, and writing off Dr...

...Partisan Review was still going strong, no THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS 157 issue of Commentary was devoid of interest, toward the close of the decade Irving Kristol founded Encounter in London, and much work of distinction appeared in the now defunct Reporter...

...Although he may never before have been regarded as a dropout, and although he can scarcely be said to have fallen silent, Norman Mailer, who remains on the Dissent masthead as a member of its editorial board, hasn't written for the magazine for almost eight years...

...Predictable in its political pieces, no longer stellar in its cultural coverage, the journal, so promising in its beginning, in many of its recent issues seems chiefly comprised of the work of mad dogs and Englishmen...

...Diana Trilling, in 1956 accused Dissent, "whose polemic is based not upon intellectual cogency but upon emotional intimidation of its readers," of creating "more anxiety in the liberal community than our continuing efforts at liberal reason can allay...

...others considered the magazine too academic, a literary venture in a world calling out for political activity...

...Or what of the unarguable fact that one of Dissent's editors and major contributors, Michael Harrington, produced a book, The Other America, which, alc- g with much supporting material in Dissent and other left-liberal journals, is acknowledged to have been a key factor in initiating the Antipoverty Program...

...Ben Seligman was that rarity: an economist unashamed of possessing a social conscience...

...And so it goes: the socialist is blown up with hope, the intellectual wields a puncturing pin...

...More recently and closer to power, it had been bruited about that the Nixon administration read the journal the Public Interest with the greatest scrupulosity, thinking, before its attention was drawn elsewhere, to take its catechism in domestic policy in those pages...

...At its inception, certainly, there was no persuasive reason to assume that Dissent would be around for long...

...Fraternity, equality of means and opportunity, a hatred of injustice, these are the major elements of a socialism which itself functions as a vision of the good society— if not a perfect one, at least a better THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS 161 one than we now have...

...Intellectual playfulness, sometimes rough and sometimes comical, was not in short supply in Dissent's first years...

...Twisted into grotesque contortions in the Soviet Union and China, found workable but uninspiring in the Scandinavian countries, insufficient to offset the thumping disadvantages of intellectual resource in the Third World, and generally rejected in the nations of Western Europe and the Americas, socialism as an active program is obviously onto lean days...

...That seems true enough...

...Apart from these people, the editors welcomed "any expression of lively and competent thought, or scholarly contributions touching upon our area of interest, even if these dissent from Dissent...

...In many ways they may have been more difficult...

...Martin Luther King, Jr., for an insufficiency of radical vision—all of which was made possible, if not palatable, because it appeared alongside the magazine's strong cachet of contributors of cultural criticism...

...Is the magazine a latecomer to women's rights, and is it correct even now...

...One either rode with the hurricane or attempted to face it down...

...In retrospect, taken together, it seems a formidable array of intellectual and political talent...

...Whatever their shortcomings or limitations, it must be said that one does not see them being replaced with anything approaching the same quality by writers of a younger generation...

...Magazines, or journals, provide the chief context in which an intellectual functions...

...they are the field upon which he battles, the sky in which (with talent) he shines, the source of much of his mental oxygen...

...These years were scarcely any easier on Dissent...

...The chief of Hannah Arendt's points was that, strategically, education was the wrong area in which to concentrate efforts toward desegregation in the South, and though hers was a position also strongly at variance with the views of most of Dissent's editors—the piece engendered a lively correspondence— the magazine ran it nevertheless...

...In countries without an intellectual capital, magazines serve as in absentia coffee houses or salons, offering, along with a forum for ideas, information, and polemic, a form of intellectual sociability whereby intellectuals learn how each other's minds work...

...What Herzen could not know was that his journal was circulated secretly, being passed hand-to-hand, a 19th-century precursor of the samizdat methods being employed in the Soviet Union today...

...Does it seem fair to say that by its early opposition to the Cold War, wl:ae itself remaining antitotalitarian, Dissent helped over the long haul to tone down and thence eventually change the temper of East-West relations...

...But with the Vietnam War now over, with Edmund Wilson, Igor Stravinsky, and W. H. Auden (who together comprised the cachet) now dead, the New York Review is a journal very much stalled...

...Perhaps only (and for once safely) the profit motive can be eliminated, for anyone who begins a serious intellectual journal with the idea of raking in large profits deserves to be disqualified—and not on moral but on strictly intellectual grounds...

...Stalinists and totalitarian fellowtravelers were to be excluded from the magazine's pages as were former radicals "who have signed their peace with society as it is...

...Richard Wright was already an established writer before he became associated with Dissent—the Pushkin of American Negro literature, the figure with whom it all began—and his impact on the magazine as a contributing editor was not notable...

...Can there be something repellent to youth in the thinking that goes into Dissent...

...Our finances are a trifle 162 JOSEPH EPSTEIN better than in the past," the editor once reported to the magazine's readers, "they are merely critical...

...Goodman's contribution was that of radical ingenuity...

...Intellectuals can rightly tell youth to go play in the sandbox...

...Flipping through the 19 bound volumes of Dissent from the perspective of today, one is regularly brought up sharp at the contributors whose names one comes across and at the defections, to the Left and to the Right both, that the tumultuous events of the past two decades have encouraged...

...Remarkably well, as it turns out...

...Only much later, well into the '60s, did Irving Howe, in a footnote to his essay "The New York Intellectuals" (in Commentary, October 1968), rightly renounce the piece, saying that when he "first received the manuscript...

...There one finds the radical impulse running in two broad streams —one European, the other American...

...Stalin, Hitler, and other catastrophes of the current century may have succeeded in pricing a belief in progress out of reach in our day...

...America...

...The New York Review of Books, begun roughly ten years ago, started off in a great blaze, having the very best names among its stable of writers and traveling under the colors of a radicalism it helped make chic...

...This Age of Conformity," Irving Howe was to style the time, in a phrase that would later become a cliche...

...While never quite joining the American Celebration, neither has Commentary found much in recent years, apart from the excesses of the Left, to criticize in American life...

...Very often they do count—sometimes indirectly, sometimes reverberating over -a long stretch of years—in the great world, yet no intellectual magazine could survive for any length of time if it had to justify its existence by what it had done in any given year to alter the shape of the world...

...In any intellectual journal other than one edited by socialist intellectuals the question might indeed be a foolish one...

...Or of Ned Polsky, a highly unacademic sociologist, who contributed memorable reports on the culture of hipsters and hustlers...

...Its value as an inspirational source may be great...

...While the situation of socialism in the world at the moment may be a point of grievous dismay to Dissent's socialist editors, it may also 'be good for the intellectual health of the magazine...

...Though not necessarily of their own choosing, intellectual magazines have tended to exist apart from the marketplace, and this has allowed those who edit and write for them to reach out not for the widest but for the highest possible audience...

...Part of the price is a certain loneliness...

...The motives for editing an intellectual journal—as opposed to an exclusively literary or a general-interest journal—are as various as the functions such a journal can perform...

...These include not writers who have gone elsewhere but those who for one reason or another have fallen silent...

...Even among bad investments, it is a disaster...

...Has Dissent changed the world in which it exists in any way...

...Whether as a set policy among its editors, or as something less than that, the effect of Dissent's attention to the work and situation of the radicals of Eastern Europe—where radicalism carries a much higher price tag than any American radical of our day has ever been required to pay— is that of an act of solidarity...

...Princesses and their jewels, beggars and their rags, intellectuals and their magazines —in each instance it is hard to imagine the one without the other...

...Takentogether, will its recent attacks on the new conservative intellectuals hold up...

...For many of its regular readers Dissent became their magazine— the magazine that, better than any other, expressed their values, discontents, and social vision...

...If for Diana Trilling Dissent was insufficiently terrified of the threat the Soviet Union posed to American freedom and altogether too negative about the virtues of American society, others came at the magazine from different directions...

...Indisputably...

...American intellectuals were said to be "reconciled" to their country...

...Can one make a case for the magazine's providing a platform for some of the most intelligent discussion of civil rights goals and strategies, and thus, by extension, having contributed to the eventual passage of significant civil rights legislation...

...The magazine's editors were all part-time, it had no office, its contributors were unpaid, and from the standpoint of design it was very far from eye-catching—fit more for the kitchen than for the coffee table...

...The men who founded Dissent were unable to believe in the early revival of the socialist movement in America...

...In a recent interview with Gunter Grass, Irving Howe remarked 160 JOSEPH EPSTEIN that "people of our politics are in trouble," the trouble being their inability to satisfy the hunger of youth, perhaps religious in its emotional content, that in recent years has diverted itself into politics...

...Yet in 1952 in a Partisan Review symposium, it was declared that American prosperity "has at long last effected the absorption of the intellectuals into the intellectual life of the country...

...Amagazine is the ideal possession, possibly the supreme toy, of the intellectual...

...Given the penchant for high-blown rhetoric, the heedlessness about destruction, and the casual unconcern about democratic values becoming increasingly endemic on the Left toward the end of the 1960s, the question for Dissent was how to remain radical, hew to principle, and not in the process become, in C. Wright Mill's acid phrase, "futilitarians of the Left...

...Polemic, not usually so personal but always political, has been at the heart of Dissent as an intellectual enterprise...

...These are brutal questions—one has only to apply them to oneself to discover how brutal—yet questions that admit of no easy answers...

...The questions worth asking about an intellectual magazine are not how it is viewed in the opinion of mankind, or not how often it has been correct on the issues, or how it has changed the world, but instead how has it responded to events, how intelligent has its voice been, what are its principles and how consistently have they been adhered to, and finally how faithful has it been to its own dreams...

...If political journalism does not figure to bring in large profits, neither is it likely to win large and unanimous acclaim...

...There is, as Lewis Coser points out in his Foreword to A Dissenter's Guide to Foreign Policy, no "Left tradition in foreign policy...

...Dissent served as well as a conduit of sorts for important writing from Eastern Europe...

...The New York Intellectuals is the convenient catch-phrase for them, these men brought up in the ideological wars of the 1930s, who, for reasons that are themselves puzzling, have always been better in their essays than in their books...

...Solidarity across oceans is perhaps easier than at close quarters...

...Zhivago received perhaps a more intelligent hearing in Dissent's pages than anywhere else—a dialogue between Nicola Chiaromonte and Lionel Abel, which attempted to come to a balanced assessment on the standing of that remarkable book as an act of human courage and a work of literary art...

...A New Political Atmosphere in America...

...In Dissent during these years one could rely upon finding small and large gems quarterly: Norman Mailer on David Riesman, C. Wright Mills on "Knowledge and Power," Irving Howe and Lewis Coser (singly or sometimes in collaboration) on a subject of polemical interest, Silone on "The Choice of Comrades," Chiaromonte on mass society, Paul Goodman on segregation...

...In some situations, a magazine can be a voice in the wilderness...

...What the magazine can claim, however, is that it has helped keep the idea—the ideal, the aspiration— of socialism alive as a human possibility...

...Among older men, A. J. Muste and Norman Thomas contributed occasional pieces, and both lent their names to the masthead...

...But all this is to overlook the main explanation for Dissent's survival, which was that it had a genuine reason for being and was, moreover, born at a period (which it would help usher in) rich in radical writing...

...May Day, later retitled Hard Times, the journal begun by James Ridgeway and Andrew Kopkind, who had worked as associate editors of the New Republic, came to life and quickly folded, its editors becoming regular contributors to Ramparts, the house organ of left-wing paranoia...

...The Autumn 1955 issue, for example, had pieces by Michael Harrington, G. L. Arnold (as George Lichtheim then signed himself), Harold Rosenberg, Irving Howe, Erich Fromm, Richard Hofstadter, Gabriel Kolko, Harvey Swados, A. J. Muste, and George Woodcock...

...Sometimes coming out slugging, other times counterpunching, from the magazine's earliest to its most recent days, its stance has been an embattled one...

...To revert back to dropouts, does anyone recall such subjects of journalistically unsustainable interest as automation, decentralization, and land reform in Latin America, if not all of Latin America itself...

...How explain this...

...It was correct in citing the shallowness of the Kennedy administration while it was still in business...

...In more recent times in Russia, the consequences of Alexander Tvardovsky's determination to print Solzhenitsyn's One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovitch in Novy Mir may eventually be more significant to Soviet society than the 20th Party Congress or the New Economic Program...

...There is even a hint of potential condescension in the relationship, the liberal looking upon the socialist— as the agnostic might upon the Orthodox Jew—as if to say, Well, if it gives comfort, this faith, what's the harm...

...After defections and deaths, there are dropouts to consider...

...Swados, though less flashy intellectually, brought a seriousness of social concern with his writing for the magazine...

...No actuarial studies have even been done on the longevity of intellectual magazines, which is probably a good thing, for if such a study were done and made available, perhaps no other intellectual magazine would ever again be begun...

...A magazine may be all the power an intellectual needs, or, for his own good, should ever be allowed...

...Let the chips fall, debate continue, freedom ring—and Dissent survive!—En...

...It seems, that is, a journal edited less for intellectual debate than for exerting political influence, which may account for why so many of its pieces over the years read like memos addressed to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare or Housing and Urban Development...

...It was, for example, correct in continuing to stress the extent and depth of poverty in America when everyone else seemed to be taken up with the subject of affluence...

...A truly international intellectual, a piece by Nicola Chiaromonte was, dependably, a work of great historical sophistication...

...It was also Hofstadter who remarked upon the danger of the obeisance of intellectuals to a single idea: If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea...

...What, for instance, has become of Daniel M. Friedenberg, once a contributing editor, who wrote well on Cuba, Africa, and on New York...

...Someone keeping a more careful scorecard over the years could doubtless find many places where the magazine was off target, or unclear, or failed in persepetive, thoroughness, or style...

...The Public Interest was begun by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, both old hands at intellectual journalism and at ideological warfare...

...Socialistintellectuals: does that hyphen house any contradictions, tensions, conflicts...

...The work of JOSEPH EPSTEIN, a visting lecturer in English at Northwestern University, appears frequently in these pages and other magazines...

...Yet the editors specifically declared no interest in forming a political party or group...

...In "Why I Write" Orwell offered four motives for his own writing, which likely apply as well to the question, if one can imagine the editor of a serious intellectual magazine writing such an essay, "Why I Edit...

...In Russia under Nicholas I, Alexander Herzen, editing two different Russian-language journals in exile in London, referred to the first of them, the Pole Star, as "my printed monologue...

...How has Dissent scored here...

...For most intellectual magazines that are not privately funded or institutionally sponsored, a good year is one in which, after considerable finagling and begging, one has to send out only one general fund-raising letter...

...as ethics, it was purest swill...

...How fragile it can be among political intellectuals...

...Podhoretz began by veering his magazine off its former Cold War course, took it sharply leftward —going so far as to run H. Stuart Hughes on unilateral disarmament—then turned abruptly back in revulsion against the New Left...

...Under its new editor, Norman Podhoretz, Commentary came near to traveling full-circle during this period...

...For those among Dissent's editors for whom socialism, both as a problem and as a goal, remains central, it remains so largely as an ideal...

...still, they saw no hope of revitalizing the Socialist Party of America, nor did they expect an extraordinary rise in interest in socialism in the United States in the near future...