In early 1953, a number of democratic socialist intellectuals gathered in literary critic Irving Howe’s living room to discuss the formation of a new political journal. McCarthyism was at its height in the United States, while Joseph Stalin still ruled over the Soviet Union. Howe and his guests knew what they wanted their new journal to be: A quarterly publication of ideas, criticism, and reporting from around the world—from de-colonialized New Delhi, from New York housing projects and Michigan auto plants—that illuminated and excoriated both the structural inequalities endemic to capitalism and the self-perpetuating tyranny baked into communism. The journal’s political perspective was clear: Capitalist economies and polities needed to be democratized and socialized so that human potential could flourish; communist totalitarian regimes needed to be democratized and socialized so that, well, human potential could flourish. At the same time, the magazine would eschew the turgid rhetoric that afflicted so much socialist writing. It would speak in plain, smart English, such as the sentence—“Socialist is the name of our desire”—with which Howe and Henry Pachter began the first issue’s ideological-definition essay.

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