 | |
 Cover of the Summer 2016 issue | |
| Co-editors |
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|---|---|
| Former editors | |
| Frequency | Quarterly |
| Publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Foundation for the Study Independent Social Ideas |
| Founded | 1954 |
| Country | United States |
| Website | www |
| ISSN | 0012-3846 (print) 1946-0910 (web) |
| OCLC | 664602786 |
Dissent is anAmerican Left intellectual magazine founded in 1954. It is published by theUniversity of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas and is currently[when?] edited by Natasha Lewis and Timothy Shenk. Former co-editors includeIrving Howe,Mitchell Cohen,Michael Walzer, and David Marcus.
The magazine was established in 1954 by a group ofNew York Intellectuals, which includedLewis A. Coser,Rose Laub Coser,Irving Howe,Norman Mailer,Henry Pachter, andMeyer Schapiro. Its co-founder and publisher for its first 15 years was University Place Book Shop ownerWalter Goldwater.[1]
From its inception,Dissent's politics deviated from the standard ideological positions of the left and right. LikePolitics, theNew Left Review and the French socialist magazineSocialisme ou Barbarie,Dissent sought to formulate a third position between the liberalism of the West and the communism of the East.[2] Troubled by the rampant bureaucratization of both capitalist and communist society,Dissent was home to writers likeC. Wright Mills andPaul Goodman, who identified themselves as radical democrats, as well as to editors who, likeIrving Howe andMichael Harrington, more closely identified withdemocratic socialism. Over its seven decades in publication, it has also become an influential venue for social and cultural criticism, publishing political philosophers includingMichael Walzer,Cornel West, andIris Marion Young, as well as novelists and poets such asGünter Grass andCzesław Miłosz.[3]
In the 1960s and 1970s,Dissent's skepticism towardThird World revolutions and the culture of theNew Left occasionally isolated it from student movements, but its commitment to both pluralist and egalitarian politics—in particular, when it came to social and civil rights issues—separated it from both the mainstream liberalism and the growingneoconservative movement. AlthoughDissent still identifies with the democratic socialism of its founders, includingLewis A. Coser andRose Laub Coser,[4] its editors and contributors represent a broad spectrum of left positions: from theMarxist humanism ofMarshall Berman andLeszek Kołakowski, to thesocial democratic revisionism ofRichard Rorty andMichael Walzer, and to theradical feminism ofEllen Willis andSeyla Benhabib.[5] In the 2010s, several of its younger editors identified themselves with the heterodoxMarxism and visions of radical democracy espoused byOccupy Wall Street.[6][7][8]
Together with theBrooklyn Institute for Social Research,Dissent announced its Archive project. It will be digitizing several short-livedliterary magazines, includingMarxist Perspectives anddemocracy, and providing access to them online.[9] It also recently launched a labor podcast and introduced a new front of the book section dedicated to publishingcultural criticism.[10][11]