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Dwight Macdonald and thepolitics Circle: The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy. By Gregory D. Sumner. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. xii, 272 pp. $32.50, ISBN 08014-3020-8.)
Gregory D. Sumner is the first historian to trace, in detail, the intellectual odyssey of the American and European writers who appeared from 1944 to 1949 in the pages of Dwight Macdonald's politics, a "little magazine" of large importance in the history of the intellectual Left. Placing Macdonald and the politics circle in the context of the political and moral crisis engendered by World War II and the early Cold War, Sumner has produced a superbly organized and beautifully written work of comparative intellectual history.
Sumner systematically analyzes Macdonald's intellectual and political trajectory in the 1940s and shrewdly assesses his strengths and weaknesses as a critic. He...