Dissent

Dissent is a quarterly magazine of politics and culture edited by Michael Kazin and Michael Walzer. A magazine of the left, Dissent is also one of independent minds and strong opinions. "A pillar of leftist intellectual provocation," writes the New York Times, Dissent is "devoted to slaying orthodoxies on the right and on the left." Adds historian John Patrick Diggins, "Dissent is kind of an anomaly...a magazine that's all heart and good hope."
 
Still Dissenting After All These Years
Founded in 1954 by a group of independent-minded radicals, the magazine set out to "dissent from the bleak atmosphere of conformism that pervades the political and intellectual life of the United States ...The accent of Dissent will be radical. Its tradition will be the tradition of democratic socialism." Inspired by their opposition to both McCarthyism and communism, its early editors "wanted to speak for the spirit of democratic utopianism that runs like a bright thread through America's intellectual life."

Quickly establishing itself as one of America's leading intellectual journals, it published articles by Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman, Günter Grass, Michael Harrington, Dwight Macdonald, C. Wright Mills, Czeslaw Milosz, Norman Mailer, Amos Oz, Richard Rorty, Ignazio Silone, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cornel West, Ellen Willis,  Richard Wright, and many other prominent writers.

Edited by Irving Howe until his death in 1993, the magazine has continued to uphold the banner of critical independence he set forth in his 1954 Partisan Review essay, "This Age of Conformity": "The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have."

Note: This journal offers payment to contributors who make their living as writers.