A Voice from the Left

...As for liberalism, the editors wrote of their intention "to assert the libertarian values of the socialist ideal" and acknowledged that their radicalism had its roots in the liberal tradition...

...Dissent has grown in many ways in its quarter-century: It is more stable, more American, more liberal, more self-confident...

...To maintain a libertarian socialist economic position would seem to require dependence to a large extent on a socialist market...

...Those that live longer than a decade are the exception...

...Until the magazine stands firmly in support of a socialist free-market economy, there will be a clear inconsistency between its economic and political positions...

...The quarterly was established as a forum for democratic socialism and radical ideas...

...Nonetheless, this is a strong collection...

...But I will not make the case...

...Over the last 25 years each side has periodically claimed to be in the minority and a victim of the other's attacks...

...A case can be made that such heterogeneity of opinion is good and fitting in a magazine that does not enforce a tight editorial voice...

...Whether or not this was a natural tendency, it was necessary if the magazine hoped to play a meaningful role in this country...

...Its opening issue contained criticisms of Commentary, for example, prompting an acid review by Nathan Glazer in the latter's back pages...

...and if the ex-radicals didn't keep kicking us while we were more or less down, we'd be even more obscure than we are...

...Harrington's plan is intended to serve while the country is transported from its present point to the socialist state beyond scarcity...

...Although Harrington is one of the best things that has happened to the American Socialist movement, his economic proposals amount to a candy-bag diversity, a piece-meal jumble of minor solutions, each apparently constructed to cure a current ill...

...The task of the magazine during the solitude of its first five years, Howe reflected in 1959, was to clean up the debris created by the disintegration of its intellectual heritage...

...One of the dissenters was Irving Howe...

...Still, Howe and Company launched their share of attacks...

...One is left to conclude that the selection may reveal some of Howe's own misgivings about the market...

...As it developed its positions, Dissent above all showed itself to be indigenous in its radicalism...

...And Dennis Wrong's evaluation of the American search for community, as well as the problems of conformity, is an enlightening exercise in social thought that would be a jewel in any anthology...

...It has been a standard complaint that socialists are better at criticizing than proposing...

...Unfortunately, many of the Dissent group think of the market as un-so-cialist, in much the same way that many Americans think of socialism as un-American...

...Thus during the '50s Dissent's anti-Communist polemics were not to be outdone...

...The writers associated with PR began to lose their radicalism in the course of World War II...

...Spitz defends the concept against those like Herbert Marcuse who feel that "correct" ideas are too precious merely to be allowed to compete with other ideas, and therefore deserve an enlightened enforcement...

...Certainly it would have made more sense to present his visions of the immediate socialist future in this anthology, rather than Harrington's...

...For anyone who doubts that Dissent's socialism has a strong strand of classical liberalism, this is one of the pieces to read...

...Moreover, since the nation in its anti-Communism blurred the distinction and became anti-socialist as well, it was vital for the new journal to stress the democratic, American aspects of its ideology...

...The picture one gets of the magazine in the early years is that of a small group of social critics besieged, wagons pulled up into a circle for protection, but emitting louder whoops than their assailants...

...Whether or not one agrees with the thrust of Dissent, it is fair to say that it serves the same function along with other publications of high journalism and theory like Commentary, The New York Review of Books and The Public Interest...

...The market is, after all, a libertarian mechanism, for it decentralizes economic decisions to the individual level...

...Typical of the plaints was Bernard Rosenberg's statement in Dissent in the late '50s that "the number of dissenters or Dissenters in American intellectual life today is pitiably small...

...One looks forward to its continued presence and growth...

...But the notion, supported by men like Henry Dickinson and Le-land Stauber, is not a subject of discussion in the magazine...

...It is a respect for liberalism that carries throughout the 25 years of the magazine, and that makes its democratic socialism relevant to the United States...

...Dissent does much better when it lets Robert Heilbroner tend to the economics...

...This collection, for instance, contains a strong essay by David Spitz on John Stuart Mill's concept of " pure tolerance" in the realm of ideas...

...Chandler Davidson's article on the culture of poverty, which proposes that characteristics usually attributed to the poor are as frequently found in the rich, is a good example of the studies that are among the most successful features of the magazine...

...Harrington's article in this collection is a good example...

...Have socialists learned so little to date that they can suppose anything other than a central authority controls production when a market is not present...

...Henry Pachter (in his article in this collection...

...That is an easy argument to make, because it is always harder to create something new than to conserve what already exists...

...Nevertheless, Dissent is often more effective as critic than as architect...

...The ontogeny of small magazines in this country consists of short lives, some of them worth the trouble...

...In PR's "Our Country and Our Culture" symposium in 1952, all except a few of the 25 contributors agreed that a stance of radical opposition was no longer necessary for American intellectuals...

...In its early years the magazine sought to preserve a radical tradition that boasted many proponents during the previous decades but had virtually collapsed by the start of the '50s...

...Bog-dan Denitch and Robert Heilbroner are among those who have intimated their acceptance of the format...

...In the process, the group that formed its nucleus started to formulate the ideas that today are predominant on the Democratic Socialist Left...

...Because of this, Twenty-Five Years of Dissent is a treasure for those interested in postwar thought in America...

...Nominally socialist, it included a cultural opposition to mainstream society that was considered the intellectuals' responsibility and had been most recently associated with Partisan Review...

...The high quality that once characterized Partisan Review, now in its 42nd year, prompted Richard Hofstadter to describe it as "a kind of house organ of the American intellectual community...

...There are cryptic references to French "indicative planning" and "democratic planning," but on how the intricacies of production will be orchestrated he is silent...

...That is hardly the way to rally the nation...

...Another is Howe's essay on the conciliation of liberalism and socialism, suggesting how little the two are mutually exclusive and underlining the benefit to each in their combination...

...Yes, some of Dissent's regular writers appear hesitantly to favor a market within a socialist society, yet as many or more reject the idea...

...Reviewed by Neil Talbot Jumonville Early in 1954??five years after Dwight Macdonald's magazine Politics died in "the gray dawn of peace," and two years after the Partisan Review symposium on "Our Country and Our Culture" formally read the last rites over the death of American intellectual radicalism??Dissent was founded by Irving Howe, Lewis Coser and a small group of other writers...

...In the area of political and social thought, though, most of its writers are to be commended for their contributions...

...That Dissent has more than merely survived, as even its detractors admit, is a measure of its considerable achievement...

...Of course, Dissent has always had an adversary relationship with liberals of a more conservative bent...

...It can be seen in Howe's defense of liberalism against the New Left during the '60s, and his essay of the '70s (included in this collection) declaring that socialists at their best propose a dialectical relationship with the best of liberalism...

...Indeed, a great problem of the magazine is that its economic prescriptions rarely match its political and social views...

...Shortly afterward, Dissent was founded to fill the gap created on the Left when the Partisan writers moved toward the Right...

...those that make it to the quarter-century mark are analyzed as curiosities...

...In the area of economics, by contrast, Dissent is often adrift in confusion...

...Well-intentioned references to democratic planning and indicative planning do not make one feel any more secure...

...It is drawn from the recent Dissent symposium, "Beyond the Welfare State," a discussion of what socialists would do now in the United States if they held power...

...Given the conservative mood of the nation in the '50s, it was a particularly risky time to launch such a publication...

...Socialists had until then pretty much ignored the American culture and mind, and naturally enough were themselves largely ignored here...

...Michael Harrington is a leading Dissent figure who remains quite suspicious of it...