Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle: The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy

"Gregory Sumner's book is wonderfully detailed in telling the story of Macdonald and the friends who helped him put out his unforgettable magazine."--Alfred Kazin

"The author has captured the spirit of the animators of politics with empathy and precision. I know--I was there. He brings to life key aspects of the radical past that are worth preserving today."--Lewis A. Coser

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. 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.

"A scholarly, informed, and impassioned meditation on the potential contribution of Macdonald's political vision for our own times."--Chicago Tribune

Born out of revulsion at the mass violence of the Second World 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.