Politics (1940s magazine)  

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Politics, stylized as politics, was a journal founded and edited by Dwight Macdonald from 1944 to 1949.

Macdonald had previously been editor at Partisan Review from 1937 to 1943, but after falling out with its publishers, quit to start politics as a rival publication, first on a monthly basis and then as a quarterly.

politics published essays on politics and culture and included among its contributors James Agee, John Berryman, Bruno Bettelheim, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Hannah Arendt.

The journal reflected Macdonald's interest in European culture. He used politics to introduce US readers to the thinking of the French philosopher Simone Weil, publishing several articles by her, including "A Poem of Force", her reflections on the Iliad. He also printed work by Albert Camus. Another European, the Italian political and literary critic Nicola Chiaromonte, was also given space in the journal.

politics was also Macdonald's vehicle for his repeated and energetic attacks against Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party campaign for President.

In a letter to Philip Rahv at the end of December 1943, George Orwell mentioned that Macdonald had written asking him to contribute to his forthcoming journal. Orwell had replied telling him he might "do something 'cultural'" but not 'political' as he was already writing his "London Letters" to Partisan Review.

In his "As I Please" article for the 16 June 1944 issue of Tribune, George Orwell recommended politics. He stated that he disagreed with its policy but admired "its combination of highbrow political analysis with intelligent literary criticism." He went on to add that there were no monthly or quarterly magazines in England "to come up to" the American ones, of which there were several.

Macdonald, in an editorial comment for the November 1944 issue of politics referred to a letter from Orwell which cast interesting light on the 'russification' of English political thought over the last two years. Orwell had read the May issue's review of Harold Laski's Faith, Reason and Civilisation and mentioned that the Manchester Evening News, the evening edition of the Manchester Guardian, had refused to print his own review because of its anti-Stalin implications. Despite considering the book "pernicious tripe", Orwell had praised the author for being "aware that the USSR is the real dynamo of the Socialist movement in this country and everywhere else.", but criticized him for shutting his eyes to "purges, liquidations", etc. Macdonald pointed out that the fact that such a review should be considered "too hot" shows how much the feats of the Red Army had misled the English public opinion about Russia. He added that the "English liberal press had been far more honest about the Moscow Trials than our own liberal journals" and that Trotsky had been able to write in the Guardian.

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Culture, high, middlebrow and mass

As the 2011 reissue by New York Review Books Classics of his signature 1950s cultural essays, "Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain" (most originally gathered in 1962 as Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture), may indicate, the phase of the career of Dwight Macdonald best known to the educated public came with his arrival in 1952 as critic on the staff of The New Yorker, there to assay with dialectical scalpel at the ready such characteristic products of postwar aspirational "middlebrow" – or "Midcult" to Macdonald – culture as the Great Books of the Western World book-sets, the Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible, the latter-day age-of-science penchant for facts over interpretative general ideas, and that hardiest of evergreens in the groves of the American book market, the how-to book. It was in politics, though, if not surprisingly, that Macdonald provided himself with a premonitory sounding board for such preoccupations, in and out of his regular roundup "Popular Culture", one of whose items also hints at Macdonald's dawn-to-decadence penchant for connecting the evolution of cultural forms to that of the stages of industrial development from which they issue:

Whatever Became of Addison Sims?
The kind of question it might be fruitful to answer is: why was self-education so much more popular several generations ago than it seems to be now? Pelmanism, Chatauqua, the Harvard Classics ('Fifteen Minutes a Day'), the International Correspondence Schools, the Roth Memory Course ('Why of course I remember you--Mr. Addison Sims of Seattle!'), Cooper Union--these have become innocent archaisms. At the turn of the century, book agents roamed the country ringing doorbells and selling sets of 'standard authors' (Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot) encyclopedias and multi-volume historical works. The book-agent has vanished; people read for amusement, not instruction, and authors are no longer 'standard' or sold in sets. Does all this perhaps show the growth of a popular instinct that education is not the golden key to progress which the Victorians thought it was? Is the myth of the self-made man fading? Is the modern world at once so irrational and so totally organized that the mass-man simply gives up, no longer hoping to understand or 'improve' his situation?
A study of self-education in the last fifty years might be a good way to answer such questions--as Orwell in his 'Ethics of the Detective Story' (POLITICS, November 1944) was able to trace in that field the deterioration of ethical standards during the same period. I can't help feeling that American critics might more profitably concern themselves with such rich and relatively unexplored areas than with trying to find something new to say about Henry James."
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Notable contributors

The following is a selected list of notable contributors to politics, including those who wrote for it at least 3 times:

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