Exposure to the many captains of industry whose works and ways he profiled, set against the deepening Depression, sharpened in him a disdain for capitalism which made common cause with an elitist, aristocratic artistic sensibility that admired the classical European past as a sustaining and shaming foil to what he saw as the cultural degradations attendant upon the ascendancy of mass society.
[7] The New York social critic Paul Goodman, whose early essays in Politics seeded his flowering into mainstream fame twenty years later, famously asserted that Macdonald "thinks with his typewriter", a restless, perpetually self-revising (and, often enough in rueful retrospect, self-mocking) quality that saw Macdonald studding the later book versions of his magazine essays with a sort of after-the-fact Greek chorus of second thoughts, self-recriminations and liberal, as it were, doses of l'esprit de l'escalier, that lent his writing a quality one critic[8] labeled "stereophonic."
Macdonald's steadfast neutrality over the Second World War put him increasingly at odds with his fellow editors, and with much of left opinion following first the attack by Hitler upon Russia and then by the Japanese upon Pearl Harbor affording the Americans, along with Hitler's declaration of war upon the United States in turn, a casus belli unto the larger conflict, prompting him to resign from Partisan Review at the end of 1943, and to launch Politics as a vehicle for his antiwar, pacifist, "third way" perspectives, arising from the belief that the developing crises would trigger soon or late an international worker's movement, socialist in form, equally bent on sweeping away both the capitalist status quo in the west and the Communist dictatorship usurping the revolutionary birthright in the Russian sphere.
– defending the motivational tactics of Patton and Halsey, Macdonald clarified his views in noting that Given his pacifist sympathies during the war, it was natural for Macdonald to run many essays from and about conscientious objectors (C.O.s), with whose position he sympathized, but whose common preference for reassignment to civilian over military-support work he did not reflexively share – as an egalitarian with revolutionary hopes for the leavening educational function of the man of conscience upon the larger population, soldiers included, he felt that a more direct presence among the armed forces was a constructive means to the desired end, a subject debated at length within the magazine,.
The accumulated horrors of total war – from bureaucratic regimentation of the home front to concentration and death camps, racialist nationalism and genocide, atomic weapons, firebombing of civilian populations, and, not least, the replacement as ruling power over Eastern and Central Europe of one, defeated total state, that of Hitler's Germany, with the newly powerful one, that of Stalinist Russia, that had helped defeat it – combined with the ongoing fading of hopes across the anti-Stalinist left for a long-dreamed socialist dawn to put into wholesale question the sort of reflexive, confident nineteenth-century belief in an all-but-inevitable Progress that had long underwritten the political dimension of western intellectual life.
[27] The inauguration of a regular department in the magazine, "New Roads", heralded the quest formally, as did a regular feature devoted to "Ancestors" from across the ranks of assorted pre-20th century anarchists (P. J. Proudhon), Macdonald's publishing in Politics of some of the earliest essays by the young Columbia-bound sociologist C. Wright Mills and the young novelist, playwright, therapist, and New York social critic Paul Goodman helped seed their rise to national fame twenty years later as two of the signature theorists undergirding the New Left critique of postwar industrial society and mass culture.
A debate between Mills and Goodman[34] over the proper locus for the critique of repressive structures in America, with Mills taking a broadly Marxist frame in examining above-ground social structures, and Goodman preferring instead to excavate the post-Freudian unconscious and the repression of instinct, with the social psychology of Karen Horney and Erich Fromm for supporting witness, prefigured the sorts of polemics that would soon crowd the American quality-paperback tables from Ann Arbor to Yale amid the renewal of campus activism and new modes of scholarship.
Other harbingers of future cultural ferment may be discerned in a long poem by the English anarcho-pacifist physician Alex Comfort[35] (ascended for all time into the global non-literary firmament since 1972 thanks to The Joy of Sex), an essay by the young San Francisco Beat-affiliated poet Robert Duncan on the internalized repression, thence redirected outward, too often afflicting "The Homosexual in Society",[36] and numerous essays by the Canadian-born London anarchist and conscientious objector George Woodcock, editor at the time of the anarchist cultural quarterly NOW, the raiding of the offices of whose publisher, Freedom Press, during the war by the political arm of the London police he chronicled in a letter[37] to Politics in all its unavoidable irony: And twenty years before his ideas on the "global village" made him a prophetic household name worldwide, the budding Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan weighed in as a contributor to Politics with a discussion of the problems of women in modern bureaucratic society.
[38] With the grim consolidation of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the ensnaring of a large part of the younger generation on the left by the Henry Wallace movement and what he felt to be common notions within of either a moral equivalence between Russia and the west, or an outright tipping of the moral scales in favor of the Soviet side, Macdonald, while still claiming adherence to the anarchist and pacifist labels, and upon re-immersion in the vast literature on recent Communist history, devoted a large opening section[39] of the Winter 1948 number of Politics to the attempt to counteract the Soviet myth, among whose articles he included an extensive reading list of standard works chronicling forced labor in the Soviet Union, the Moscow trials, the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33, dating back to the early critiques of the Bolshevik experiment in its infancy published by the anarchist Emma Goldman and the eminent English philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Macdonald changed its original monthly frequency to quarterly early in its fourth year of six, and acknowledged in an aside[47] to subscribers his awareness of its chronic scheduling delays in a rueful aside in the issue for (in the best of all intended worlds) Summer 1948: Nancy's humanitarian and philanthropic background played a key role in an ongoing project of the magazine after the war, that of "Packages Abroad",[48] by which regular appeals to readers, channeled directly or through such standard relief agencies as CARE, enabled the donation of food, clothing, shoes and coal for heating to thousands of individuals and families across war-ravaged Europe deprived of them.
In her preface to a 1968 reissue of the full run of Politics, the eminent German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt asserted that 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,[50] 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.
indebted to the social philosophies of Mohandas Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau, Leo 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.