Establishment Following the failure of
Progressive Party candidate
Henry A. Wallace in the
1948 presidential election, two former Wallace supporters, and ex-
Harvard colleagues, met on a
New Hampshire farm where one of them was living. The two men were literary scholar and
Christian socialist F. O. "Matty" Matthiessen and
Marxist economist Paul Sweezy. Matthiessen, who came into an inheritance after his father died in a car accident in
California, had no pressing need for the inheritance money. He offered Sweezy to underwrite "that magazine [Sweezy] and Leo Huberman were always talking about" by committing the sum of $5,000 per year for three years. While Matthiessen was the
angel investor of the new publication, the editorial responsibilities were handled by Sweezy and his friend
Leo Huberman. The latter was a
New York University-educated author of left-wing books and pamphlets during the 1930s and '40s. He worked full-time on the
Monthly Review from its establishment until his death of a
heart attack in 1968. Briefly joining Sweezy and Huberman as a third founding editor of
Monthly Review — although not listed as such on the publication's
masthead — was German émigré
Otto Nathan (1893–1987). While his time with the magazine was short, he was instrumental in obtaining the lead piece for the debut May 1949 issue:
Albert Einstein's essay "
Why Socialism?". Another key contributor during the magazine's first 15 years was economist
Paul Baran, frequently considered as the third member of an editorial troika including Sweezy and Huberman.
Monthly Review launched in 1949 with only 450 subscribers, most of whom were acquaintances of Huberman or Sweezy. The magazine's ideology and readership paralleled that of the independent socialist weekly newspaper
The National Guardian, established in 1948. Despite a prevailing conservative political climate in the U.S.,
Monthly Review quickly reached a critical mass of subscribers, with its paid circulation rising to 2,500 in 1950, and to 6,000 by mid-decade.
McCarthy period During the
McCarthyism era in the early 1950s, editors Sweezy and Huberman were targeted for "subversive activities". historian
William Appleman Williams (1952), and sociologist
C. Wright Mills (1958).
New Left era and after In the mid-1960s, radical political theory experienced a resurgence with the rise of the
New Left in North America and Europe.
Monthly Review rose in popularity with this resurgence. While remaining an intellectual magazine not oriented towards mass readership, its circulation nonetheless climbed over the next decade, approaching 9,100 in 1970 before peaking at 11,500 in 1977. Although
Monthly Review had roots in the so-called "Old Left", it was not unsympathetic to the young radical movement which grew in conjunction with the
Civil Rights Movement, and with the opposition to
conscription and the
Vietnam War. Among those associated with the 1960s New Left, and published by
Monthly Review, were
C. Wright Mills,
Herbert Marcuse,
Todd Gitlin,
Carl Oglesby,
David Horowitz,
James Weinstein, and
Noam Chomsky. The magazine's editorial staff was joined in May 1969 by radical economist
Harry Magdoff, replacing Leo Huberman, who had died the previous year. Magdoff—author of
The Age of Imperialism and an
MR reader since its inception in 1949—bolstered the already well-developed
anti-imperialist, "
Third-Worldist" orientation of the publication that was fueled by revolutionary events in
Cuba, China, and
Vietnam. A
Maoist influence also made itself felt in the magazine's content from this period.
Monthly Review sided with the New Left in condemning the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The magazine also denounced the suppression of the
Polish trade union "Solidarity" through
martial law in 1981. In the latter case, Sweezy declared that the incident proved beyond doubt that "the Communist regimes of the
Soviet bloc have become the expression and the guardians of a new rigidified hierarchical structure which has nothing in common with the kind of socialist society Marxists have always regarded as the goal of modern working class movements." With the weakening of the American Left in the 1980s,
Monthly Reviews circulation dropped from its peak levels back to the 8,000 range. In 1983, the magazine suffered its most severe financial crisis. As Robert McChesney writes, "the combination of recession, inflation, sharply higher printing costs, and declining circulation" resulted in an emergency appeal to subscribers, which successfully raised $100,000 to stave off insolvency. She was a former
New Left Review board member and author of
The Retreat from Class (1986). She stayed on as co-editor until 2000 when Robert McChesney and
John Bellamy Foster assumed primary editorial duties.
Monthly Review is still published as a print magazine, offering 11 issues per year (one per month, with July and August combined into a single issue). Each issue generally features original content, including full articles, book reviews, and poetry, with exceptions such as reprises or adaptations of previously published work. Everything in the current print version is freely available on the magazine's website. Archived issues going back to 1949 are only available to subscribers. In addition to posting magazine content, the
MR website hosts
Monthly Review Press and
MR Online. ==Political orientation==