Politics (journal) - Reception and Influence

Reception and Influence

In his column in the left-wing London Tribune, George Orwell wrote favorably of Politics, as reprinted in a subscription advertisement in the latter paper in August, 1944: “One cannot buy magazines from abroad nowadays, but I recommend anyone who has a friend in New York to try and cadge a copy of Politics, the new monthly magazine edited by the Marxist literary critic, Dwight Macdonald. I don’t agree with the policy of this paper, which is anti-war (not from a pacifist angle), but I admire its combination of highbrow political analysis with intelligent literary criticism... Politically, the paper in this country most nearly corresponding to Politics would be, I suppose, The New Leader. You have only to compare the get-up, the style of writing, the range of subjects, and the intellectual level of the two papers, to see what it means to live in a country where there are still leisure and wood-pulp.” In her preface to a 1968 reissue of the full run of Politics, the eminent German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt asserted that

"When I was asked to write a brief introduction to the reprint edition of Politics I was tempted to yield to the rather pleasant melancholy of “once upon a time” and to indulge in the nostalgic contemplation that seems to be the appropriate mood for all recollection. Now that I have carefully reread the forty-two issues which appeared from 1944 to 1949—more carefully, I am sure, than I read them more than twenty years ago—this mood has vanished for the simple reason that so many of its articles, comments, and factual reports read as though they were written today or yesterday or yesteryear, except that the concerns and perplexities of a little magazine with a peak circulation of not much more than 5,000 have become the daily bread of newspapers and periodicals with mass circulation. For the issues, far from being outdated, let alone resolved, by the enormous changes in our everyday world, have only increased in urgency."

The Polish poet and 1980 Nobelist in Literature, Czesław Miłosz, whose renowned 1953 essay collection The Captive Mind, amplified a number of Macdonald's own themes regarding the effect of Stalinism on the European mind, found in Macdonald's own independent, anti-authoritarian ethical humanism much to admire, seeing in him a successor to "Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville ... a totally American phenomenon--the completely free man, capable of making decisions at all times and about all things strictly according to his personal moral judgment." Macdonald's friend the Hungarian-born American historian John Lukacs, like Macdonald a cultural traditionalist equally critical of standard-issue American politics either right-wing or pas d’ennemi à gauche progressive, in the Jesuit weekly America in 1958 christened him an "American Orwell", as John Rodden indicates:

"Noting that Macdonald's American 'reputation is rising,' Lukacs wrote that he was already known among British intellectuals 'as one of the most interesting American critics of these times.' In particular Lukacs lauded Macdonald's 'lonely and courageous positions' in the mid-1940s -- on Yalta, the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender, the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans -- and argued that Macdonald's political stance 'coincides with the often lonely positions taken by George Orwell amidst the leftist intelligentsia in Britain.'"

Along with the prominence among leading social critics of the 1960s of such early contributors to Politics as Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills, and Macdonald's role among the founding circle of Europhile New York literary and political intellectuals who wrote for the influential biweekly New York Review of Books (1963-), a mainstay of postwar intellectual life, among which Macdonald's impassioned critiques of Lyndon Johnson and American policy in Vietnam renewed his role as Second World War gadfly, mention might be made of such long-running little magazines founded in the wake of Politics as MANAS (1948-1988), a one-man weekly edited by Henry Geiger, a Los Angeles Theosophist, Indophile, commercial printer and Second World War C.O. indebted to the social philosophies of Gandhi, Thoreau, Tolstoy and Ortega y Gasset, and who published the 1953 pamphlet revision of Macdonald's The Root is Man; and Dissent (1954-), the quarterly founded by early Politics contributor Irving Howe, a leading anti-Stalinist democratic socialist whose equal prominence as a critic of modern European literature found its cognate in Dissent in the prominent space devoted, much after the precedent of Politics, to Continental thinkers and social developments.