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Politics Past

Macdonald, Dwight
Publisher:  Viking Press, New York, USA
Year Published:  1970   First Published:  1958
Pages:  376pp  
Dewey:  322.42
Resource Type:  Book

A collection of essays by Dwight Macdonald.

Abstract:  Formerly titled Memoirs of a Revolutionary, this book is a large collection of essays by Dwight Macdonald, which bring to light "a whole period of extraordinary confusion and turmoil in American political and intellectual life." Divided into six categories -- "The Responsibility of Peoples," "Looking at the War," "The Cultural Front," "Political Pathology," "Saints," and "By the Way" -- the essays cover a range of political issues with a special focus on the Second World War. They were written over a number of years and, amongst other things, discuss the effects of the actions/ideologies of people like Stalin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Churchill and others.

Dwight Macdonald was a writer, editor, philosopher, social critic and political radical. He wrote for The New Yorker, published more than thirty essays and reviews in The New York Review of Books, started his own journal ("Politics") in 1944, contributed to Esquire as a film critic and supplied movie reviews to The Today Show.

[Abstract by Nabeeha Chaudhary]


Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: The Responsibility of Peoples
1. The Responsibility of Peoples
2. Massacre from the Air
3. The Germans - Three Years Later
4. Notes on the Psychology of Killing
5. My Favourite General
6. The Responsibility of Intellectuals
7. Two Footnotes to History

Part II: Looking at the War
8. The Unconscious War
9. C.P.U.S.A. Liquidates Itself
10. Roosevelt's Labour Draft
11. Internationale into Nationale
12. Monte Cassino
13. "Native Politics"
14. Three Worlds
15. Mr Churchill's Spades
16. The Prospects for Revolution
17. Warsaw
18. 'Twas a Famous Victory
19. 1919 v 1944
20. Old Judge Hull and the Refugees
21. Horrors - Ours and Theirs
22. A Japanese Badoglio?
23. The Bomb
24. The Late War: A Trial Balance
25. Stalin's February 9th Speech
26. Truman's Doctrine, Abroad and at Home
27. The Pacifist Dilemna
28. "I Choose the West"

Part III: The Cultural Front
29. Kulturbolshewismus and Mr Van Wyck Brooks
30. Homage to 12 Judges
31. Bureaucratic Culture: Nicholas I and Josef I
32. The Eisenstein Tragedy
33. Alien Corn
34. Liberal Soap Opera
35. Memo to Mr Luce
36. A Way of Death

Part IV: Political Pathology
37. On the Proletariat as a Revolutionary Class
38. Trotskyism I: "The Only Really Moral People"
39. Trotskyism II: Revolution, Ltd
40. A Historic Moment
41. The Death of F D R
42. "People's Capitalism"
43. Curiouser and Curiouser
44. What is Totalitarian Liberalism?
45. The Truth About the UN
46. A Note on Wallese
47. Remarks on the Constitution of the Mongol People's Republic
48. USA v USSR
49. The Great Thaw
50. The Neo-Non-Conservatism, or Notes on a Career

Part V: Saints
51. Gandhi
52. Dorothy Day

Part VI: By the Way
53. The Question of God
54. Too Big

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