The seven essays in this book include three previously published, one written long ago but hitherto lying unpublished, and three written in recent years and now published here.

Of the three previously published, the essay on Woodrow Wilson (Chapter IV) I worked on and wrote over a period stretching from 1957 to 1960 and published in 1960 in Studies on the Left; subsequently, it was republished in various anthologies and in the Bobbs-Merrill reprint series. The essay on political and cultural consequences of the disaccumulation of capital (Chapter V) I worked on during the 1960s and published in 1969 in Radical America. The essay on Henry Adams and the 1960's “New Left” (Chapter VI) I prepared as a presentation to the Socialist Scholars Conference of 1966 in New York City, and published much later, on invitation, in the Maryland Historian, in 1982, as something of a document of one aspect of leftist thinking in the 1960s.

The unpublished older essay, on Dollar Diplomacy (Chapter III), I wrote as a chapter of my University of Wisconsin Master's Thesis, completed in 1962, “Woodrow Wilson, the Six-Power Consortium, and Dollar Diplomacy: Essays in the Ideology of Modern United States Liberalism in Its Period of Emergence.”

Of the three essays written in recent years, the essay on the United States considered as a developing country (Chapter I) I wrote specifically for this volume; it represents my thought in its latest phase.