It is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas and is currently edited by Natasha Lewis and Timothy Shenk.

Like Politics, the New Left Review and the French socialist magazine Socialisme ou Barbarie, Dissent sought to formulate a third position between the liberalism of the West and the communism of the East.

Over its seven decades in publication, it has also become an influential venue for social and cultural criticism, publishing political philosophers including Michael Walzer, Cornel West, and Iris Marion Young, as well as novelists and poets such as Günter Grass and Czesław Miłosz.

Although Dissent still identifies with the democratic socialism of its founders, including Lewis A. Coser and Rose Laub Coser,[4] its editors and contributors represent a broad spectrum of left positions: from the Marxist humanism of Marshall Berman and Leszek Kołakowski, to the social democratic revisionism of Richard Rorty and Michael Walzer, and to the radical feminism of Ellen Willis and Seyla Benhabib.

[5] In the 2010s, several of its younger editors identified themselves with the heterodox Marxism and visions of radical democracy espoused by Occupy Wall Street.