Dwight MacDonald and the politics circle

the long version

One of the best known and most iconoclastic of the "New York Intellectuals" of the 1930s and 1940s, Dwight Macdonald was also the editor of politics, a little magazine that brought together vital and provocative voices to speak against the radical excesses of both the left and the right after World War II. This remarkable collaboration involved dissidents such as C. Wright Mills, Mary McCarthy, Albert Camus, Nicola Chiaromonte, and Simone Weil. In it, Gregory D. Sumner finds the clearest expression of Macdonald's creative power and of the political thinking that would eventually bridge the "Old Left" and the "New". Born out of revulsion at the mass violence of the war, politics became the center of an international dialogue about post-Marxist alternatives to the cold war. Sumner tells the story of the magazine's brief, tumultuous season, and brings to life the characters and dramatic moments that made it the forum for debate about the road to peaceful, democratic reconstruction of a war-torn social order.