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What new left history gave us, the new left historians’ withering critiques of liberalism have proven enormously influential. but do they hold up in our more conservative age, tagged history new left.

I n this age of partisan and ideological polarization, something unusual happened in May: A writer from the right delivered an encomium to a writer from the left. The Washington Examiner ’s Timothy Carney—a relentless libertarian who has never seen a government program he did not view as a squalid arrangement between statist liberals and corporate welfare seekers—paid tribute to Gabriel Kolko, a historian identified with the New Left of the 1960s who had passed away earlier that month.

Carney wrote that Americans typically believe a classic “fable” that courageous “trust busters” like Teddy Roosevelt used “the big stick of federal power to battle the greedy corporations.” Kolko’s work, especially his most significant book, The Triumph of Conservatism (1963), though little known today to anybody but specialists in early twentieth-century history, “dismantled this myth.” Carney quoted Kolko’s core argument: “The dominant fact of American political life” in the Progressive Era “was that big business led the struggle for the federal regulation of the economy.” And to both Carney and Kolko, this is pretty much everything you need to know.

It’s hard to call a historian “forgotten” in a country in which the phrase “that’s ancient history!” is about the most withering description of irrelevance imaginable. But Kolko is, at least, semi-forgotten. While a nontenured faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania during the Vietnam War, Kolko, at great risk to his academic career, exposed to the media and led protests against a university research program in chemical and biological weaponry funded by the Defense Department. Penn froze his salary and forced him to leave. Perhaps if Kolko had remained at an Ivy League research institution, he would have been better known at the time of his death. Instead, he ultimately spent most of his career teaching at York University in Toronto, writing several highly critical works about U.S. foreign policy before living his final years in Amsterdam.

When it was published, The Triumph of Conservatism completely undermined the dominant narratives about the Progressive Era: that a countervailing federal government, determined to limit the power of big business, had done just that; or that middle-class professionals and technocrats had engineered a rational mixture of markets and regulatory monitoring to moderate both business concentration on the right and labor and agrarian agitation on the left.

Kolko was one of several important scholars who came to prominence in the 1960s and, in the words of Peter Novick, the great interpreter and chronicler of the American historical profession, became “homogenized” as “New Left historians.” The phrase captures in its large net scholars who, despite a shared adversarial stance against the conventions of the profession, vehemently disagreed with one another about historical interpretation, the political prospects of the larger New Left, and the relationship between scholarship and political activism.

Still, when a prominent libertarian writer extols a half-century-old work that is contemptuous of the reform of modern American capitalism, written by a leftist scholar who spent most of his career teaching in Canada, attention must be paid. And not just to that scholar, but also to the current of thought that nurtured his career. New Left historiography was at once a movement to transform—and lead—the historical profession, a set of methods and topics to alter historical scholarship, and an effort to create an intellectual infrastructure that would be linked to an ascendant political movement and that would educate that movement about the successes and failures of its radical antecedents. Who were these historians who grew to intellectual maturity with the New Left and saw themselves as both scholars and activists? What did they accomplish intellectually? Can liberals and leftists take anything from their work today in the way the admiring libertarian, Timothy Carney, finds support for his arguments in the scholarship of Gabriel Kolko?

Against Consensus

New Left historiography focused, not always congruently, on the machinations of the powerful and the resistance of the powerless. The historical scholarship paralleled contemporary developments: The post-New Deal state of the 1950s seemed feckless and enervated to these young historians (and then, during the ’60s, criminal), and the civil rights and anti-war movements in which many of them participated were great upsurges of mass protest that encouraged scholars to seek historical precedents.

New Left-affiliated historians emphasized three large themes of historical interpretation. The first was corporate liberalism (or what Kolko called “political capitalism”), the purported collusion between political and business elites—with a cameo role for labor unions—to stabilize the economy and suppress a radical leftist alternative. Secondly, they embraced history “from the bottom up”: the depiction of a culturally semiautonomous resistance against mercantile and professional elites among the poor, non-property-owning class in colonial and early America; against industrial capitalism among the white working class in the nineteenth century; and against the system of Southern chattel slavery among the slaves. Finally, they voiced a sharp criticism (undertaken by Kolko, among others) of the self-serving rationale since the late nineteenth century for the use of U.S. power abroad—what William Appleman Williams referred to in his 1959 classic, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy , as America’s conception of itself as embodying a “unique combination of economic power, intellectual and practical genius, and moral rigor” that allowed it “to check the enemies of peace and progress—and build a better world—without erecting an empire in the process.” Williams was, of course, ahead of his time: Several years later, the focus on the historical roots of American interventionism synergized with the growing movement against the war in Vietnam.

In addition, feminist and African-American history overlapped somewhat with New Left history—especially in the latter case, via the work of Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Vincent Harding, and Harold Cruse—but those disciplines followed separate trajectories in conjunction with the feminist, civil rights, and black nationalist movements.

As a movement of paradigmatic thought, New Left history had a primary locus of intellectual fermentation: the history department at the University of Wisconsin. Madison was the spawning ground for many (but far from all) New Left historians, including Gutman, Martin J. Sklar, Ronald Radosh (then another expositor of corporate liberalism, but later a convert to conservatism), and Paul Buhle. Madison had a great tradition of producing progressive politicians like Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette. In addition, a long list of iconoclastic academics such as Frederick Jackson Turner and the pioneering labor economists John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely had taught at the university. As it happened, it became a kind of upper Midwest oasis for the next leftist generation, many of whom were Jewish and/or Red Diaper babies from New York or Chicago. (Kolko, too, passed through Madison, receiving his master’s from Wisconsin in 1955 before earning his doctorate from Harvard.)

Wisconsin’s Appleman Williams, the leading revisionist historical critic of American foreign policy, inspired and taught many of the radicalized young historians. Graduate students at Wisconsin founded Studies on the Left , the short-lived (1959-67) but most significant historical journal of the New Left. As Buhle suggests in the introduction to his fascinating anthology of reminiscences from faculty and students at Wisconsin, History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950-1970 (1990), two roughly contemporary frames of historical analysis originated, competed, and complemented each other in Madison. These were a top-down focus on the “manipulation of the masses by the American elite” as a “smooth” process, which, especially in Williams’s work on foreign policy, made intuitive sense (except when war triggered public opposition, elites controlled foreign policy and made it on their own behalf); and a bottom-up depiction of the social dynamics and cultural and political agency of workers, slaves, and (later) women.

Gutman was already working within the latter framework in the late 1950s, but his work and that of countless other young American leftist historians was given an enormous lift by the publication of the paperback version of E.P. Thompson’s monumental The Making of the English Working Class (1966). As Thompson eloquently argued in perhaps the most quoted introduction from a work of history in English of the past 50 years, he did not “see class as a ‘structure,’ nor even as a ‘category,’ but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships…. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.” Class as a lived reality constructed by workers through collective actions rather than as a static category imposed upon them by intellectuals became the guiding tenet of American left social history for a generation and more.

To this was added the mantra of “thick description” taken from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz: the close analysis of culturally embedded group behaviors. The quotidian habits of social solidarity, which Gutman described with passionate brilliance in small nineteenth-century Midwestern and Eastern towns and slave communities alike, evoked a logic of tough, even fierce agency, without quite obscuring the grimmer truth that the elites remained in control of the political economy.

As Daniel Rodgers writes in his 2011 book Age of Fracture , culture was for Thompson and Gutman a “resource of the oppressed.” But it was not, frequently, a winning resource. Thompson’s justly famous plea in his introduction that he wished to “rescue the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver…from the enormous condescension of posterity” readily concedes that these workers might have been, as he continued, “casualties of history.” To quote a hesitant but perceptive undergraduate student of mine from long ago, as I fervently related Gutman’s argument that black families under slavery created their own wedding ceremonies and maintained separate surnames from those given them by their slave masters: “But…they were still slaves, right?” This exchange dampened my enthusiasm for teaching Gutman for a very long time.

A Critique of Liberalism

Rereading The Triumph of Conservatism and other works by Kolko after 35 years is to consider an almost mirror-opposite set of interpretative problems to those posed by Gutman and Thompson’s work. I opened the book with a vague memory that it was what it claimed to be: a powerful revisionist reading of the Progressive Era. The dutiful underlining and margin notes remain in my battered text, but a more skeptical eye has replaced my youthful credulity. The book is not nearly as compelling as I remember it.

It is arid and mono-causal, indeed almost monomaniacal. It marches through one rote example after another designed to demonstrate the author’s thesis without the slightest ambiguities or qualifications. Kolko tells story after story that reveals his overarching thesis that big business and capital joined with Theodore Roosevelt and other key politicians to regulate the economy to their advantage and to the disadvantage of potential competitors. For Kolko, even the Socialist Party, an influential political force at the time, shares the same views as the titans of business. Via selective quotations, Kolko subsumes the party of the great anti-capitalist Eugene Debs into the vast machinery of a centralized oligarchic capitalism.

Like Foucault, Kolko constructs a closed system of power: Resistance is not only futile, but merely a muffled shout somewhere outside the locked-door meetings in which politicians, bankers, and corporate leaders consciously worked to co-opt any and all challenges. There is barely a hint in the book—a paragraph on page 285, to be exact—that there were enormous social tensions roiling the country during the period under discussion. Labor was organizing and striking and frequently meeting violent resistance from companies and the state; farmers were unhappy; there were countless variations of aggressive and influential middle-class reformers dealing with issues ranging from immigration to family socialization to restrictions on alcohol; and the Socialist Party was growing, from the tenements of New York to the flatlands of Oklahoma. Kolko, himself writing before the apex of the New Left’s own activism, notes all of this, but doesn’t really see it; as Gutman shrewdly observed in a 1982 interview, the interpretive schema of corporate liberalism “is a expression of the political pessimism of the 1950s and early 1960s, which is simply being projected backward.”

Despite their apparent mastery of the political process he describes, the big corporations and banks, in Kolko’s own words, fail frequently. Somehow, the major insurance companies were unable to attain their goal of federalizing insurance regulation—to this day, each individual state regulates (rather laxly, say reformers) multibillion-dollar insurance companies. A bill to regulate food and drugs that industry opposed was passed in 1906. Similarly, the “Aldrich Plan,” developed to create a national system of reserve banks, named after as powerful an elite as one could imagine (Nelson Aldrich was the leader of the Senate Republicans, and his daughter married John D. Rockefeller Jr.), and supported by many of the nation’s most powerful bankers, could not even come to a vote in Congress.

And the book contains strange historical misreadings. In a particularly peculiar yet revealing example, Kolko downplays J.P. Morgan’s role in organizing his fellow plutocrats to limit the great financial Panic of 1907. Morgan was at the time America’s most prominent and powerful banker. His actions during the panic are so well documented by historians and biographers that Kolko’s contention that he “sat by and watched inexorable fate move in” is bizarre. But, as always, Kolko wants to drive home his larger thesis: in this case, that the New York banking interests were unable to rationalize their own sector in the face of industrial combines financing their own expansion via stock offerings. So Morgan, rather than being a whirlwind of self-interested activism—creating lending consortiums, reaching out to fellow titans like John D. Rockefeller and steel magnate Henry Frick for logistical and financial support, and deciding whether key banks would live or die—becomes, in Kolko’s unique telling, a passive stooge of the Treasury Department.

Kolko is also (like his present-day admirer Carney) obsessed with the motives of powerful actors at the expense of policy results. Because the major meatpackers wanted to “enforce and extend” the inspection laws in order to impose compliance costs upon their smaller competitors, Kolko dismisses meat inspection as a scam by big business. But even if the large meatpackers got something they wanted (and even if the law could have been much improved), maybe it’s still a good idea for a government that doesn’t want its citizens to be poisoned by rancid meat to, you know, inspect the meat. This was the goal of progressive reformers, and it also happened to benefit many more people than just the behemoth of Big Meat. Conservation, too, in Kolko’s telling, is just a sop to the lumber industry. And indeed, the industry played a major role in creating conservation policy, because its long-term fortunes were being adversely affected by “indiscriminate cutting”—yet so were those of the general public, which relies upon rational and prudent management of natural resources.

Another telling example, this from Kolko’s Main Currents in Modern American History (1976), is his curt dismissal of child labor laws. Again, the idea—in part true—is that Northern textile companies wanted to impose the costs of hiring adults on their Southern competitors. As Kolko sees it, their support for child labor laws was “purely and simply to strike a blow” against their competitors. But this ignores the longstanding movement against child labor—Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Lillian Wald had formed the National Child Labor Committee in 1904—that was a primary reason that a bill, however limited, was ultimately passed (if then struck down by a conservative Supreme Court two years later).

The bald instrumentalism of Kolko’s analysis marks every page of Triumph . Martin J. Sklar, as a graduate student at Wisconsin, invented the term “corporate liberalism” and had a sophisticated analysis that carefully distinguished different variants. (Sklar, who died a few weeks before Kolko, was a self-destructive but much more creative historian than Kolko, and was recently the subject of two long, informative profiles in The New Republic and The Nation by friends and former colleagues John Judis and James Livingston, respectively.) For Kolko, who preferred the term “political capitalism,” large corporations and finance capital sought to protect themselves from competition and to use weaker federal regulation as a shield from potentially more meddlesome state regulations. They also rolled over small-business competitors.

Moreover, according to James Weinstein, another analyst of corporate liberalism and an important editor of Studies on the Left , the unions were also in on the deal, as a kind of junior partner to the federal government, big business, and banking. But in fact, as Sklar later pointed out, labor was too weak in the early twentieth century to be much of a partner to capital and the state. Rather, suggests Sklar, big business and small business together, over a couple of decades, reached an accommodation with unions to integrate widespread collective bargaining into the economy—a deal that bore fruit only beginning in the late 1930s and early 1940s, with the wartime production/no strike agreement reached by the Roosevelt Administration, business, and labor during the Second World War.

Leftists like Kolko, Weinstein, and Sklar emerged at exactly the moment when a huge cohort of postwar college students was chafing at the quiescence of the Eisenhower compromise with the New Deal order. The Triumph of Conservatism is a great example of a scholar, his subject, and his times harmonically converging. Kolko expressed the contempt the New Left historians felt toward both their professional predecessors—the “consensus” historians, with their too-easy assumption of American virtue (as seen even in their book titles: The Genius of American Politics ; People of Plenty )—and the entire rotting edifice of the bureaucratic liberal state and its massive twin failures: its acquiescence to Southern white supremacy, and, a few years later, its hubris in undertaking the brutal, imperialist fiasco of Vietnam. In the early and mid-1960s, the New Left, holding aloft the Port Huron Statement, its signature rejection of every major American institution, concluded that the liberal state had shamed America, and Kolko and Weinstein were there to explain that liberalism was never what it was cracked up to be. As Weinstein wrote in his 1967 essay in Studies on the Left , “Notes on the Need for a Socialist Party,” it was a “myth” that “liberalism is a movement against the power of business…. Liberalism is not a neutral system of political thought, but an ideology that sustains and strengthens the existing power structure.”

Infiltrating the Establishment

During the late 1960s, every major American institution seemed up for grabs, subject to the withering criticism of Black Power and anti-war student activists and their allies among junior faculty. New Left historians not only challenged the reigning methods and interpretations within American historical scholarship; they attempted a takeover of the profession itself.

In 1969, at the height of opposition to the Vietnam War, a group of New Left historians, mostly junior scholars, attempted to capture the profession’s major organization, the American Historical Association (AHA). The two-pronged effort consisted of proposing a resolution condemning U.S. involvement in the war and electing as the AHA’s new president Staughton Lynd, the son of the eminent sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, authors of the emblematic study of middle America, Middletown (actually Muncie, Indiana). Lynd was an activist, an intellectual historian of colonial and early America, and a teacher who sought to bring his activism and his revisionist scholarship to the classroom. In comparison with Kolko’s bleak outlook in the early 1960s, Lynd’s work was tied optimistically to what he believed were the increasing revolutionary possibilities of the New Left. For example, in his 1968 work The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism , Lynd attempted a tortured comparison between Marx and the Founding Fathers as cautious elites distrustful of radical movements from below, concluding that the abolitionists could teach all of these trimmers a lesson because “one should not invoke the ultimate act of revolution without willingness to see new institutions perpetually improvised from below; the withering away of the state must begin in the process of changing the state; freedom must mean freedom now.”

After doing his doctoral work at Columbia, Lynd had taught at all-black Spelman College in Atlanta during the civil rights movement and went on to help create the Mississippi Freedom Schools, an extraordinary effort at alternative education for black Mississippi children during what became known later as the “Freedom Summer” of 1964. In 1965, now with a position at Yale, he went to Hanoi with Tom Hayden, the young author of the Port Huron Statement, and Herbert Aptheker, a Communist Party member and Marxist historian of slavery. While there, Lynd (accurately) accused the U.S. government of lying about its participation in the war. Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster (later something of a hero to the left for defending the rights of the Black Panther Party), “used language from the law of treason” to describe Lynd’s activities in Hanoi, according to Lynd’s biographer, Carl Mirra. Yale fired Lynd in 1968, and he was unable to get a job anywhere else for political reasons. Later, he was to become a rank-and-file labor lawyer. But in 1969, then a scholar without an institution, he remained one of the most compelling historians of the New Left generation.

While Lynd attempted a procedural challenge to the AHA, his colleague Jesse Lemisch made a powerful intellectual assault on the historical establishment. Like Lynd, Lemisch had also been let go from an elite academic post, in his case at the University of Chicago. Also a historian of early American history, he had popularized the phrase “history from the bottom up” as a way to “make the inarticulate speak.”

Lemisch presented an extraordinary paper at the 1969 AHA convention entitled “Present-Mindedness Revisited” (later reprinted as “On Active Service in War and Peace”). The paper had already been rejected by the two major journals in the field—and rejected with genuine shock that its author could possibly have imagined it might be published. As an anonymous peer reviewer wrote to the editor of the Journal of American History , “I don’t know how you can tell [Lemisch] that he certainly can’t do this, and that he simply cannot do it in the pages of the Journal.” Lemisch’s paper is highly polemical, but it is also a careful reconstruction of the political biases of the consensus historians, accusing them of reflexively expressing the very same “present-mindedness” that Irwin Unger, a mainstream historian, had angrily accused the New Leftists of in an infamous paper two years earlier. Lemisch flips Unger’s attack on the New Leftists back onto the leading figures of the profession. He criticized prominent historians like Daniel Boorstin, who blithely admitted to the House Committee on Un-American Activities that some of his scholarship was, essentially, hagiography in the service of extolling the “unique virtues of American democracy,” and Stanley Elkins, the scholar of slavery who chastised the abolitionists for lacking the “balance” to oppose slavery while supporting social stability. Ultimately, Lemisch’s point was to assert that he and his young colleagues were trying to be better historians than their mentors, “trying to come a little closer to finding out how things actually were.”

For sheer chutzpah, Lemisch’s essay is remarkable in a way that is impossible to imagine in today’s more placid university environment (“You cannot lecture us on civility while you legitimize barbarity”). Just as some of the young New Left historians like Lynd feared, professionalization—the fear of losing a job in academia or the desire to enjoy the perks that came with holding one—would make such an attack on the most powerful scholars in the field by an aspiring junior faculty member unthinkable today. (Lemisch did survive to have a long academic career at SUNY Buffalo, and later at John Jay College.)

The establishment did not sit still in the face of these attacks. The anti-war resolution and Lynd’s presidential candidacy triggered a counter-movement from the AHA mainstream. It was led by perhaps the country’s most distinguished historian, Richard Hofstadter, abetted by various other liberals, a few more conservative eminences like the aforementioned Boorstin, and, in a fascinating twist, Eugene Genovese, the prominent Marxist historian and subsequent author of what remains the most influential history of American slavery in the past 40 years, Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974). Genovese had himself often been linked to the New Left historical cohort; he was a former editor of Studies on the Left after the journal moved to New York in 1962. Hofstadter invested his behind-the-scenes reputational capital, while Genovese provided the public firepower.

Hofstadter, who would die from leukemia at age 54 the following year, was profoundly worried that the profession, like his beloved Columbia University after the campus uprising of 1968, would become hysterically politicized—though he himself, at age 28, had briefly participated in a failed attempt in 1944 to oppose the elevation to the AHA’s presidency of a historian (and former ambassador to Spain) who’d been accused of supporting Franco during the Spanish Civil War. The New Left historians’ plan (a classic one for any small group of committed adherents seeking to take over an organization) was to surprise and overwhelm with numbers the business meeting of the AHA (typically a low-attendance snoozer), pass the anti-war resolution, and elect Lynd over R.R. Palmer, the establishment choice and eminent historian of the era of the French Revolution.

As Peter Novick mordantly observes, the radicals, in an almost parodic example of insurgent naiveté, deliberately left their key strategy memo in the reserved stacks at the State Historical Society in Wisconsin so it could be shared with prospective comrades. But instead, the non-radical faction of Wisconsin’s history department sent the memo along to the offices of the AHA. Hofstadter, as his biographer, David Brown, writes, sent a group letter to every member of the AHA, urging them to attend the business meeting and, in Brown’s words, “put down the young Turks…looking to politicize the association.” As Brown tells it, attendance swelled from 116 the previous year to more than 1,400. The anti-war resolution was defeated and Lynd received just 28 percent of the vote. The AHA, in a procedural hedge against future left-wing rebellion, weakened the power of the business meeting going forward.

Far more flamboyantly, Genovese opposed the New Left faction with a characteristically subtle argument that he expressed in a characteristically unsubtle way. Unlike Hofstadter, Genovese did not want, precisely, for universities to be apolitical. As Novick notes, he worried that the effort of Lynd and other New Leftists to make scholarship “immediately relevant” would undermine the university as a safe haven for a long-term Gramscian “war of position” undertaken by strategically farsighted leftist intellectuals like, well, himself. For similar reasons, Genovese, who had famously welcomed a Viet Cong victory just four years earlier, fought against an institutional resolution opposing the war. Lynd’s gambit had enraged Genovese and revealed his own authoritarian temperament. Genovese (and then-fellow leftist Christopher Lasch) thought Lynd’s scholarship was garbage: a delusional and ahistorical fantasy, polemically imposing on the past Lynd’s romantic hopes for a contemporary social revolution, full of presentist formulations like the one about Marx and the Founders.

In this academic chapter in the history of intra-left disputes, Lynd and his rebellious colleagues played the role of the abolitionists demanding freedom now, and Genovese, in turn, displayed the rage against Lynd and his attempted takeover of the AHA that Lenin and Trotsky had for the rebellious Kronstadt sailors in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Labeling Lynd and his supporters “totalitarians” during the AHA’s business meeting, Genovese—“screaming,” as Mirra describes it—urged his colleagues to “put these so-called radicals down, put them down hard, and put them down once and for all.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral of New Left historiography: Soon enough, leftist and feminist historians took over the field, particularly in American history. In 1978, Genovese was elected president of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the historians’ organization that focuses exclusively on the study of the United States. In 1980, even William Appleman Williams, the great Wisconsin mentor to New Leftist historians whom conservative historians frequently disparaged, assumed the same office. Linda Gordon, whose feminist activism in the 1970s integrated with her scholarship, is one of less than a handful of historians who have been twice awarded what is probably the profession’s highest honor, the Bancroft Prize. Another two-time Bancroft Prize winner who came along about a decade behind Kolko is Eric Foner—arguably not only the leading leftist historian today and the leading historian of the Civil War/Reconstruction era, but perhaps the most eminent contemporary American historian, period. In fact, the next two generations of great American historians, following the cohort of Kolko and Lynd, have been mostly identified as liberal-left and/or feminist.

Progressive History in a Conservative Age

The writing of history has its own history. Today’s historians no longer chastise the hegemonic liberalism of the post-New Deal order in the way young historians like Kolko, Weinstein, and Sklar did 50 years ago. Since 1980, liberal and leftist historians have written in an era of conservative ascendancy, while within the discipline itself, a kind of social democratic left-feminism dominates the profession’s leading organizations: Foner has served as president of both the AHA and the OAH, and a profession that, for decades, elected only men to run its top organizations now regularly elects women.

Today, historians of the left are more interested in the study of the rise of modern American conservatism, especially its mobilization at the state and local level. As Timothy Carney’s respect for Kolko’s work indicates, corporate liberalism may be an attractive paradigm for conservatives and libertarians. Many of them wish not only to limit corporate influence on the state but also to limit the federal government’s power to provide basic social insurance and to regulate the environment, occupational safety, and consumer products. Libertarians just wish to leave private economic power to its own devices (but without statist favoritism). Kolko wanted to destroy “political capitalism,” although he did not think a leftist alternative was up to the task. Libertarians, by contrast, want to boost capitalism and merely destroy the political-statist link to it. (Throughout his career, Kolko, unlike erstwhile comrades like Genovese, Sklar, and Radosh, remained a committed leftist and believed that libertarians misused his work for their own ideological purposes.)

There is a variation of the libertarian critique of state-capital collusion—which echoes the critiques made by Kolko and Weinstein—that is expressed among leftists critical of the Obama Administration. Critics of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), for example, made much of the fact that the Obama Administration had cut deals with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries that would provide those sectors with billions of dollars from newly insured patients. And it was true. Somehow lost in this outbreak of the obvious was the fact that while an integrated single payer or nonprofit health insurance as most advanced countries have was far preferable, this second-best choice benefited not only the companies, but also millions of poor and working-class Americans. They would now have health insurance that might spare them great medical and economic anxieties that they would otherwise never have—just as most of the critics, left and right, already had for themselves, and, if under 65, also obtained from private insurers. So, in an oddly symbiotic way, politics derived from The Triumph of Conservatism continue to influence debates a century after the period it examined and a half-century after its publication.

Yet the way a historian of the left might frame a scholarly inquiry today is often different from the way Kolko and his colleagues looked at the world during the 1960s. The reforms of the Progressive Era and the New Deal, which seemed so inadequate to Kolko and others when compared to a robust socialist challenge to capitalism, appear more impressive when compared instead to either the revanchist hysteria of the modern conservative movement or, for example, the actually existing authoritarian alternatives from both right and left during the New Deal. Plutocrats who have compared contemporary America to Nazi Germany are not interested in cleverly co-opting barely breathing labor unions and the liberal left with modest reforms. They want to crush these forces. The incremental improvement of the ACA is, to them, a giant signpost on the highway to a collectivist state.

Thus, a statist liberalism with all of its compromises might be viewed with more sympathy by today’s generation of leftist historians as the best bulwark against the concentrated wealth and power of conservative billionaires, especially given the power of each state under federalism to lower the standard for human decency below the national norm. (Recall that Kolko had argued the opposite: that the federal government was undercutting progressive state governments.) The most interesting recent scholarship about the Progressive Era—from, among others, Daniel Rodgers, Michael McGerr, and Elizabeth Sanders—depicts not the hermetically sealed elitist deal-making that Kolko describes, but an energized, diffuse reform movement, spanning large segments of the working class, farmers, journalists, academics, other professionals, and both major parties.

New Left historians, buoyed by the movements of their own time, judged American capitalism compared to a radical or socialist alternative that, in their telling, might have been realized. Compare an exemplary essay of New Left historiography by Stanford’s Barton Bernstein published in 1967 about the New Deal with recent liberal historical works on the subject by Eric Rauchway and Ira Katznelson. Bernstein’s essay, “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform,” is all but contemptuous of Roosevelt and the liberal New Dealers: He chronologically extends Kolko’s theory of statist-big business collusion into the 1930s, writing that “there was no significant redistribution of power in American society.” Unlike Kolko, Bernstein believes that socialism was a real option: “Operating within very safe channels, Roosevelt not only avoided Marxism and the socialization of property, but he also stopped far short of other possibilities—communal direction of production or the organized distribution of surplus.” It is true that FDR had certain discrete choices he decided against—for instance, nationalizing the failing banking system when he came to office in March 1933. Yet when Upton Sinclair (the very same guy who precipitated the reform of meatpacking nearly 30 years earlier) ran in 1934 as the Democratic nominee for governor of California on a genuinely radical program of state seizure of unused factories and farmlands on behalf of the unemployed, he was badly defeated—yes, in part because every business interest in the state, from agriculture to Hollywood, joined forces to beat him while FDR sat on his hands. But such fanatical conservative opposition was to be expected. The point is that the American left of the 1930s—the left that was significantly farther left than FDR or even the CIO—was not nearly popular and powerful enough to overcome this.

A different emphasis—born in a different time, one of (mostly) quiescence on the left, trench warfare for limited reforms by liberals, and ethno-nationalist rage on the right—yields a more measured historical analysis. Rauchway, in a concise survey entitled The Great Depression and the New Deal (2008), and Katznelson, in his much-praised Fear Itself (2013), acknowledge all of the limitations of the New Deal’s reforms and FDR’s own frequent conservative instincts, while underscoring that the Southern segregationist bloc within the Democratic Party tied Roosevelt’s hands (what Katznelson and co-author Sean Farhang have famously called the “Southern imposition”). In fact, the central argument of Katznelson’s book is that the limited but profound New Deal reforms—Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, and the creation of a welfare capitalism that was also racist—were possible only because the segregationist Southern Democratic members of Congress permitted them. Bernstein insists that FDR “capitulated to the forces of racism.” He did not, for example, risk endorsing an anti-lynching bill, a great moral failing even if the bill would have been defeated anyway. But it is more accurate to observe that FDR indeed battled the Southern segregationist bloc, and lost. Rauchway and Katznelson note (as Bernstein had failed to) that in 1938, Roosevelt targeted several key Southern senators for defeat in primaries; Rauchway quotes him as insisting that the South must become a “liberal democracy.” But FDR’s more liberal candidates lost all of those elections.

Rauchway and Katznelson situate the New Deal in relationship to the actual totalitarian and authoritarian responses to the Depression and political unrest in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. (And even other democracies—during the Second World War, the United States held an election, the UK did not.) By that relative—another word for “historical”—standard, Rauchway argues that “the openly experimental, obviously fallible, always compromised quality of the New Deal” looks rather good. And remember the effort to outlaw child labor during the Progressive Era? The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the last great legislative achievement of the New Deal, finally accomplished that. Moreover, the New Left historians, so focused on nineteenth-century working-class history, failed to explain how the militant industrial worker upsurges of the 1930s could have resulted from the defeat of the nineteenth-century movements. It took latter-day labor historians like Lizabeth Cohen in Making a New Deal (1990) to describe the congealing of a multi-ethnic and racial (albeit riven by racism) industrial working class brought together in part by the promise of America contained in the nascent popular culture of radio and movies.

Thus, in the same way that the New Left historians contested the interpretations of the consensus and Progressive historians before them, so have subsequent generations of American historians elaborated, synthesized, and revised the work of Kolko, Weinstein, Gutman, and others. This recent work is more sophisticated both from the top down and the bottom up. Today’s liberal-left historians have come much closer to achieving what the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the history of society” rather than concentrating exclusively on the agency of the powerful, or on white working class and African-American resistance to the powerful. As Eric Foner wrote in the preface to his magisterial (the word is here, for once, used with its full weight) Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 , he wished to “[transcend] the present compartmentalization of historical study into ‘social’ and ‘political’ components” and to “view the period as a whole, integrating the social, political, and economic aspects of Reconstruction into a coherent, analytical narrative.”

And, importantly, unlike the labor history of the New Left that mostly did not connect to that generation’s labor activists and rank and file, today’s academic history is broadly influential among non-academic liberal writers and scholars. Every writer I know interested in the “American dilemma” of slavery, Jim Crow, and institutional racism has read Reconstruction . Every feminist has read Linda Gordon’s history of birth control, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (1976, then revised). African-American public intellectuals and political writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jamelle Bouie, and Melissa Harris-Perry (herself a political scientist teaching at Wake Forest) have drawn deeply upon the work of contemporary American historians and other academics. Coates has insisted that no informed political writer can afford not to rely on this work, and it has buttressed his own analysis of American history, the evolution of white supremacy, and the case for reparations to black Americans. The 24/7 social media also facilitates today’s scholarship. Even the most erudite academics can be seen chatting on Harris-Perry’s or Chris Hayes’ show, or tweeting (very) pithy versions of their scholarship.

My first draft of this essay included a too-long list of great works of American history from just the past 30 years. For better and for worse, this is not history tied to a simultaneous mass social justice movement the way New Left history was; rather, analytical detachment and precision are gained and spontaneity and polemical energy are lost. The newer historical scholarship grounds the intellectual “war of position” that Eugene Genovese believed leftists would need to carry out in American institutions and public culture over many decades. These more recent works are part of the standard knowledge base of the newest American intellectual left. The impediments of hierarchy are more clearly defined, conceptually and geographically, than in the work of the New Left historians.

All of these histories and many others—some by rough contemporaries of Kolko and Gutman like Foner, Gordon, and James McPherson, others by younger historians—have themselves a historical lineage in the relentless, impassioned, flawed, ambitious, top-down/bottom-up work of the New Left historians. I would, of course, recommend the works mentioned here and many others to conservatives too—and I have, to several of them. In fact, I have some more suggestions for Timothy Carney, who was gracious and perceptive in linking his own thinking to that of one of the founding New Left historians, Gabriel Kolko. I’m glad he took a lot from The Triumph of Conservatism . But, you know, it’s not that great of a book. Despite a world full of despair, sometimes history, and even the writing of history, gets better over time.

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Mapping the New Left Antisemitism The Fathom Essays

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Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism. The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in the West and causing alarming spikes in antisemitic incitement and incidents. Fathom journal has examined these questions relentlessly in the first decade of its existence, earning a reputation for careful textual analysis and cogent advocacy. In this book, the Fathom essays are contextualised by three new contributions: Lesley Klaff provides a map of contemporary antisemitic forms of antizionism, Dave Rich writes on the oft-neglected lived experience of the Jewish victims of contemporary antisemitism and David Hirsh assesses the intellectual history of the left from which both Fathom and his own London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, as well as this book series, have emerged. Topics covered by the contributors include antisemitic antizionism and its underappreciated Soviet roots; the impact of analogies with the Nazis; the rise of antisemitism on the European continent, exploring the hybrid forms emerging from a cross-fertilisation between new left, Christian and Islamist antisemitism; the impact of antizionist activism on higher education; and the bitter debates over the adoption of the oft-misrepresented International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. This work will be of considerable appeal to scholars and activists with an interest in antisemitism, Jewish studies and the politics of Israel.

Alan Johnson is the founder and editor of Fathom journal. A professor of democratic theory and practice, he has served on the editorial boards of Socialist Organiser , Historical Materialism and the US socialist journals New Politics and Dissent . His writings on the left, and on antisemitism, include ‘Aurum de Stercore: anti-totalitarianism in the thought of Primo Levi’, in Thinking Towards Humanity. Themes From Norman Geras , edited by Stephen De Wijze and Eve Garrard (2012), and the report Institutionally Antisemitic: Contemporary Left Antisemitism and the Crisis in the British Labour Party (2019).

Critics' Reviews

‘Antisemitism has often presented itself as a satisfactory explanation for what is wrong with the world, and repeatedly offered tragic recipes for how to improve that world. Do our moral and political ideals today reproduce past prejudice and projection? We cannot know without reflection, and it is difficult to imagine a better stimulus to reflection than the essays gathered in this informative, wide-ranging, and important volume’. David Nirenberg , author of Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition ‘This is an indispensable volume on an unignorable subject’. Anthony Julius , author of Trials of the Diaspora: The History of Anti-Semitism in England ‘Written by many of this generation’s leading scholars, Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays is a valuable compilation of learned, deeply insightful analyses of contemporary anti-Jewish hostility prevalent in significant strains of western political thought. An eye-opening, much-needed collection, it offers critically important reflections on a phenomenon too often overlooked or denied: the pernicious links between “anti-Zionism” and antisemitism within the political left’. Alvin Rosenfeld , Professor of English and Jewish Studies and Irving M. Glazer Chair, Jewish Studies Director, Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University at Bloomington, USA ‘ Fathom has played an invaluable role challenging some dangerous myths concerning Jews and Zionism that have corrupted parts of the left. This wide-ranging collection will compel anyone concerned with a future left to worry about intellectually and historically simplistic formulas’. Mitchell Cohen , Professor of Political Science at Baruch College of the City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. 1991-2009 co-editor of Dissent , one of the United States' leading intellectual quarterlies, now an Editor Emeritus ‘ Mapping the New Left Antisemitism is essential reading for anyone interested in one of the most destructive ideologies of the 21st century. It includes essays by some of the most pertinent scholars on antisemitism from the political left and makes the case for the urgency of combating antisemitism in its most modern forms’. Gunther Jikeli , Erna B. Rosenfeld Professor in Jewish Studies and Associate Director at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University Bloomington, USA ‘This collection of essays on contemporary left antisemitism showcases the best qualities of Alan Johnson’s Fathom , which focuses relentlessly on the heart of the problem of how people relate to Israel. People who consider themselves to be well-informed and anti-racist are too often confused about the facts and prone to stumbling into antisemitic ways of thinking. Johnson is attentive to the temptation to use an invented notion of Jews or Zionism to make sense of a frightening world. He educates about the situation and provides a platform (through Fathom ) for smart people writing from diverse viewpoints’. Rosa Freedman , inaugural Professor of Law, Conflict and Global Development at the University of Reading, and a Research Fellow at The London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, UK ‘In 10 years Fathom has already published half a century's worth of critically important essays and reviews’. Michael Walzer , Professor (Emeritus) of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ; author of Just and Unjust Wars (1977), among other books; former co-editor of Dissent magazine for twenty years

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Mapping the New Left Antisemitism

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Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism.

The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in the West and causing alarming spikes in antisemitic incitement and incidents. Fathom journal has examined these questions relentlessly in the first decade of its existence, earning a reputation for careful textual analysis and cogent advocacy. In this book, the Fathom essays are contextualised by three new contributions: Lesley Klaff provides a map of contemporary antisemitic forms of antizionism, Dave Rich writes on the oft-neglected lived experience of the Jewish victims of contemporary antisemitism and David Hirsh assesses the intellectual history of the left from which both Fathom and his own London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, as well as this book series, have emerged. Topics covered by the contributors include antisemitic antizionism and its underappreciated Soviet roots; the impact of analogies with the Nazis; the rise of antisemitism on the European continent, exploring the hybrid forms emerging from a cross-fertilisation between new left, Christian and Islamist antisemitism; the impact of antizionist activism on higher education; and the bitter debates over the adoption of the oft-misrepresented International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

This work will be of considerable appeal to scholars and activists with an interest in antisemitism, Jewish studies and the politics of Israel.

Part 1 | 46 pages, introduction and contexts, chapter 1 | 10 pages, introduction to mapping left antisemitism, chapter 2 | 15 pages, a new form of the oldest hatred, chapter 3 | 12 pages, the jewish experience of antisemitism, chapter 4 | 7 pages, the left and the jews, part 2 | 60 pages, contemporary left antisemitism, chapter 5 | 8 pages, what is left antisemitism, chapter 6 | 8 pages, anti-zionism and anti-semitism, chapter 7 | 7 pages, alibi antisemitism, chapter 8 | 7 pages, like a cloud contains a storm, chapter 9 | 6 pages, what corbyn's favourite sociologists greg philo and mike berry get wrong about contemporary antisemitism, chapter 10 | 7 pages, antisemitism and the left, chapter 11 | 8 pages, chapter 12 | 7 pages, ‘toxic gifts’, part 3 | 32 pages, the soviet roots of contemporary left antisemitism, chapter 13 | 13 pages, soviet anti-zionism and contemporary left antisemitism, chapter 14 | 9 pages, communists against jews, chapter 15 | 8 pages, the german left's undeclared wars on israel, part 4 | 26 pages, left antisemitism and the holocaust, chapter 16 | 4 pages, holocaust inversion and contemporary antisemitism, chapter 17 | 3 pages, hitler and the nazis' anti-zionism, chapter 18 | 17 pages, holocaust falsifiers, part 5 | 41 pages, left antisemitism in europe and the united states, chapter 19 | 13 pages, reflections on contemporary antisemitism in europe, chapter 20 | 4 pages, the unwelcome arrival of the quenelle, chapter 21 | 9 pages, a modern orthodox-christian ritual murder libel, chapter 22 | 13 pages, we shall be as a city on a hill, part 6 | 32 pages, left antisemitism and academia, chapter 23 | 14 pages, the meaning of david miller, chapter 24 | 9 pages, from scholarship to polemic a case study of the emerging crisis in academic publishing on israel, chapter 25 | 7 pages, pathologising ‘jewish being and thinking’, part 7 | 17 pages, the international holocaust remembrance alliance, chapter 26 | 7 pages, on misrepresentations of the ihra definition of antisemitism, chapter 27 | 8 pages, political antisemitism, part 8 | 63 pages, theory and left antisemitism, chapter 28 | 15 pages, misreading hannah arendt, chapter 29 | 8 pages, the pleasures of antisemitism, chapter 30 | 11 pages, intersectionality and antisemitism, chapter 31 | 27 pages, left alternatives to left antisemitism.

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September / 2023

Fathom collection published by routledge press.

Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism.

This work will be of considerable appeal to scholars and activists with an interest in antisemitism, Jewish studies and the politics of Israel.

‘In 10 years Fathom has already published half a century’s worth of critically important essays and reviews’. Michael Walzer , Professor (Emeritus) of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ; author of Just and Unjust Wars (1977), among other books; former co-editor of Dissent magazine for twenty years

‘Antisemitism has often presented itself as a satisfactory explanation for what is wrong with the world, and repeatedly offered tragic recipes for how to improve that world. Do our moral and political ideals today reproduce past prejudice and projection? We cannot know without reflection, and it is difficult to imagine a better stimulus to reflection than the essays gathered in this informative, wide-ranging, and important volume’. David Nirenberg , author of Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition

‘This is an indispensable volume on an unignorable subject’. Anthony Julius , author of Trials of the Diaspora: The History of Anti-Semitism in England

‘Written by many of this generation’s leading scholars, Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays is a valuable compilation of learned, deeply insightful analyses of contemporary anti-Jewish hostility prevalent in significant strains of western political thought. An eye-opening, much-needed collection, it offers critically important reflections on a phenomenon too often overlooked or denied: the pernicious links between “anti-Zionism” and antisemitism within the political left’. Alvin Rosenfeld , Professor of English and Jewish Studies and Irving M. Glazer Chair, Jewish Studies Director, Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University at Bloomington, USA

‘ Fathom has played an invaluable role challenging some dangerous myths concerning Jews and Zionism that have corrupted parts of the left. This wide-ranging collection will compel anyone concerned with a future left to worry about intellectually and historically simplistic formulas’. Mitchell Cohen , Professor of Political Science at Baruch College of the City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. 1991-2009 co-editor of Dissent , one of the United States’ leading intellectual quarterlies, now an Editor Emeritus

‘ Mapping the New Left Antisemitism is essential reading for anyone interested in one of the most destructive ideologies of the 21st century. It includes essays by some of the most pertinent scholars on antisemitism from the political left and makes the case for the urgency of combating antisemitism in its most modern forms’. Gunther Jikeli , Erna B. Rosenfeld Professor in Jewish Studies and Associate Director at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University Bloomington, USA

‘This collection of essays on contemporary left antisemitism showcases the best qualities of Alan Johnson’s Fathom , which focuses relentlessly on the heart of the problem of how people relate to Israel. People who consider themselves to be well-informed and anti-racist are too often confused about the facts and prone to stumbling into antisemitic ways of thinking. Johnson is attentive to the temptation to use an invented notion of Jews or Zionism to make sense of a frightening world. He educates about the situation and provides a platform (through Fathom ) for smart people writing from diverse viewpoints’. Rosa Freedman , inaugural Professor of Law, Conflict and Global Development at the University of Reading, and a Research Fellow at The London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, UK

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The Making of the New Left

Protesters from the Free Speech Movement

The New Left was born in the early nineteen-sixties as a revolt against the modern university, and it died less than ten years later, in the auto-da-fé of Vietnam. Although it helped mobilize opinion on issues like civil rights, urban poverty, the arms race, and the war, the New Left never had its hands on the levers of political power. But it changed left-wing politics. It made individual freedom and authenticity the goals of political action, and it inspired people who cared about injustice and inequality to reject the existing system of power relations, and to begin anew.

If this was a fantasy, then so was the Declaration of Independence. Fresh starts are not difficult in politics. They are impossible. You can shake yourself loose from some of the past, but never from all of it. “All men are created equal” did not turn the page on slavery. But there were many who hoped that it would, and if there weren’t people willing to place all their bets on a better future—and that was the spirit of the New Left—then we would not be worth much as a society.

The New Left emerged independently at two great postwar knowledge factories, the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley. More than a third of their students were in graduate or professional school. Michigan had more contracts with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration than any other university in the country. Berkeley was the main federal contractor for nuclear research, and had more Nobel laureates on its faculty than any other university in the world.

Michigan was the birthplace of the largest and best-known student political organization of the decade, and probably ever: Students for a Democratic Society. S.D.S. was descended from the Student League for Industrial Democracy ( SLID ), which had been limping along for decades until, in 1960, it was renamed, on the ground that, as the first president of S.D.S., Alan Haber, put it, SLID was an embarrassing acronym for an outfit in decline.

Haber had entered the University of Michigan as an undergraduate in 1954 (and did not receive his B.A. until 1965). His first name was Robert, for the Progressive senator Robert La Follette, of Wisconsin, and his parents approved of SLID and their son’s politics. He was known as the campus radical, but he was not a fire-eater. If S.D.S. had been associated only with people like him, it would almost certainly have failed to attract recruits. It needed a charismatic person who came from the place most students at Midwestern public universities in the nineteen-fifties came from, the shores of the American mainstream. Tom Hayden was such a person.

Hayden was born in Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit, in 1939. His parents were Catholic—he was named for St. Thomas Aquinas—who, unusually, divorced, and Hayden was raised principally by his mother in somewhat straitened circumstances. But he had a normal childhood, and he did well in school. He entered Michigan in 1957 and became a reporter on the student paper, the Michigan Daily . Hayden had no political ambitions. In his coursework, he was drawn to the existentialists, then very much in vogue in American colleges. But in 1960 there was an uptick in student activism, and Hayden, a twenty-one-year-old college junior, independent and professionally uncommitted, was perfectly positioned to be caught up in it. “I didn’t get political,” as he put it. “Things got political.”

The inspiration for the Northern student movement was a Southern student movement. On February 1, 1960, four first-year students from the all-Black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in the Woolworth’s department store in downtown Greensboro. The waitress (who was Black) refused to serve them, so they sat there all day. The next day, nineteen additional students showed up to sit at the lunch counter. The day after, it was eighty-five. By the end of the week, there were an estimated four hundred. Sit-ins quickly spread, and, within ten weeks, the movement had led to the formation, under the leadership of the civil-rights veteran Ella Baker, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ), which would become a major activist organization of the civil-rights movement.

In March, Haber came to Hayden’s office at the Daily . He told him that Michigan students were picketing Ann Arbor stores as a show of sympathy for the Southern students and suggested that he cover it. Hayden wrote some stories about the picketers, but he had little impulse to join them. Around the same time, though, he read “On the Road,” which had come out in 1957, and the book inspired him, like many others, to hitchhike to California. There, he got a quick course in politics.

In Berkeley, he met with students who had demonstrated at an appearance in San Francisco of the House Un-American Activities Committee ( huac ) and had been dispersed with fire hoses by the police. In Delano, he met organizers for Chicano farmworkers. In Los Angeles, at the Democratic National Convention that nominated John F. Kennedy for President, he interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr . At a student conference near Monterey, Hayden gave a talk on “value stimulation.” The spirit of self-determination, he said, “has bowed to the vast industrial and organizational expansion of the last 75 years. As a result, the majority of students feel helpless to chart their society’s direction. The purpose of the student movements is at once simple and profound: to prove human beings are still the measure.”

The final stop on Hayden’s road trip was the annual conference of the National Student Association (N.S.A.), which was being held at the University of Minnesota. About twenty-five members of SNCC had been invited. Hayden was thrilled to meet them. “They lived on a fuller level of feeling than any people I’d ever seen,” he wrote later, “partly because they were making modern history in a very personal way, and partly because by risking death they came to know the value of living each moment to the fullest. Looking back, this was a key turning point, the moment my political identity began to take shape.”

The N.S.A. convention was debating whether to adopt a statement of support for the sit-ins. The issue was controversial for some delegates because it meant endorsing illegal actions. One of the speakers in favor of a statement of support was a white graduate student from the University of Texas named Sandra (Casey) Cason.

Cason was from Victoria, Texas. She took racial segregation “as a personal affront,” she later wrote, “viewing it as a restriction on my freedom.” Even before Greensboro, Cason had participated in protests against segregation in Austin, where she was active in the Young Women’s Christian Association. The University of Texas had started admitting Black undergraduates in 1956, but only one dormitory was desegregated, the Christian Faith and Life Community. That is where Cason lived. She got interested in existentialism and began reading Camus. After graduating, she taught Bible school in Harlem, and read James Baldwin .

“If I had known that not a single lunch counter would open as a result of my action, I could not have done differently than I did,” she said in her speech to the N.S.A. delegates in Minneapolis. She went on:

I am thankful for the sit-ins if for no other reason than that they provided me with an opportunity for making a slogan into a reality by making a decision into an action. It seems to me that this is what life is all about. While I would hope that the N.S.A. Congress will pass a strong sit-in resolution, I am more concerned that all of us, Negro and white, realize the possibility of becoming less inhuman humans through commitment and action with all their frightening complexities. When Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay taxes to a government which supported slavery, Emerson went to visit him. “Henry David,” said Emerson, “what are you doing in there?” Thoreau looked at him and replied, “Ralph Waldo, what are you doing out there ?”

She paused, then she repeated the last line. There was an ovation. The convention endorsed the sit-ins by a vote of 305–37.

Hayden was stunned. In almost any earlier left-wing political organization, Cason’s speech would have been written off as an expression of bourgeois individualism. But she was saying exactly what Hayden had been saying in Monterey. She was telling the students that this was about them .

It is doubtful whether Black demonstrators being taunted, fire-hosed, beaten, and arrested felt that they were coming to know “the value of living each moment to the fullest.” People like Cason and Hayden cared about injustice, but the fundamental appeal of politics for them was existential. “We were alike . . . in our sense of moral adventure, our existential sensibility, our love of poetic action, and our feeling of romantic involvement,” Hayden wrote about meeting Cason. He was now ready to join S.D.S.

Two people standing at table covered in piles of paper.

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He courted Cason by sending her boxes of books, including Hermann Hesse ’s “Siddhartha,” which he had frantically underlined. They got married in 1961 and eventually moved to New York City, and it was there, in a railroad flat on West Twenty-second Street, that Hayden wrote the first draft of what would be known as the Port Huron Statement. “I was influenced deeply by ‘The Power Elite,’ ” Hayden said, and the effect of C. Wright Mills’s 1956 book is obvious.

Mills, who was born in Waco, Texas, in 1916, was a large and energetic man, the kind of person who builds his own furniture. He was also disciplined, organized, and prolific. By the time he died, of a heart attack, at the age of forty-five, he had written more than half a dozen books.

Mills spent most of his career at Columbia. He was self-consciously a maverick, and had no compunction about criticizing his colleagues, some of whom were happy to return the favor. As a sociologist and a social critic—the roles were the same for him—Mills was interested in the problem of power. And he came to feel that there had been a change in power relations in the United States, caused by what he called “the new international position of the United States”—that is, the Cold War.

In “ The Power Elite ,” Mills argued that power was in the hands of three institutions: “the political directorate,” “the corporate rich,” and the military. The power of the first group, the politicians, had waned relative to the power of the two others, whom he called “corporate chieftains” and “professional warlords.” But the significant thing was that the three groups did not have rival interests: they constituted a single homogeneous ruling class whose members, virtually all white male Protestants, circulated from one institution to another. Dwight Eisenhower was in the military élite, then became President and filled his Cabinet with corporate heads.

Mills never explained exactly what the interests of the power élite were, or just what their ideology was. But ideology was not what engaged him. He believed, as John Dewey believed, that democratic participation is an essential constituent of self-realization, whatever decisions are collectively arrived at. Mills concluded that American democracy in this sense was broken. “Ordinary men,” he wrote, “often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. . . . The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass society who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power.” (Although Mills grew up in a Jim Crow state, “The Power Elite” has nothing to say about race relations.)

The Port Huron Statement echoes Mills. It says that the Cold War had made the military the dominant power in what Hayden called (after Mills) “the triangular relations of the business, military, and political arenas.” Domestic needs, from housing and health care to minority rights, were all subordinated “to the primary objective of the ‘military and economic strength of the Free World.’ ” The Cold War was making the United States undemocratic.

Who could be agents of change in such a regime? The working class is the agent of change in leftist theory, a theory to which organizations like the League for Industrial Democracy (the progenitor and sponsor of slid ) remained true. By this stage in his career, though, Mills had no use for organized labor. Labor leaders sat at the table with the rest of the power élite, he said, but they played no real role in decision-making. Faith in the revolutionary mission of the proletariat belonged to what he called the “labor metaphysic,” a Victorian relic. Mills was not really interested in wealth and income inequality anyway. He was interested in power inequality. But he had no candidate for a change agent.

In the fall of 1956, Mills went to the University of Copenhagen on a Fulbright, and travelled around Europe (sometimes on a BMW motorcycle that he bought in Munich and that became an iconic ingredient in his persona). In 1957, he gave a talk at the London School of Economics. That visit was his introduction to the intellectual left in Britain, and he and his hosts hit it off. Mills had been disappointed by the reception of “The Power Elite” in the United States; in Britain, he found people who thought the way he did. “I was much heartened by the way my kind of stuff is taken up there,” he wrote to an American friend.

The British intellectuals to whom Mills was drawn—among them, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall , the historian E. P. Thompson, and the sociologist Ralph Miliband—were calling themselves the New Left. They were more Marxist than Mills was, but they believed that culture and ideology had become as important as class in determining the course of history.

Mills returned to the L.S.E. in 1959 to give three lectures entitled “Culture and Politics.” (“A huge, alarming Texan has just been lecturing to the London School of Economics,” the Observer reported.) The following year, Mills wrote an article for the British journal New Left Review , which Thompson and Hall had founded. “I have been studying, for several years now, the cultural apparatus, the intellectuals—as a possible, immediate, radical agency of change,” he wrote. “For a long time, I was not much happier with this idea than were many of you; but it turns out now, in the spring of 1960, that it may be a very relevant idea indeed.” Travelling abroad, he had come to believe that young intellectuals were capable of enlightening and mobilizing the public. The article was called “Letter to the New Left.”

Mills’s “Letter” was mocked by his Columbia colleague Daniel Bell, who called Mills “a kind of faculty adviser to the ‘young angries’ and ‘would-be angries’ of the Western world.” But the “Letter” was taken up by S.D.S., which circulated copies among its members and reprinted it in a journal, Studies on the Left, launched by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin. “He seemed to be speaking to us directly,” Hayden wrote about the “Letter.” Mills had “identified ourselves, the young and the intellectuals, as the new vanguard.”

This was a wishful misreading. Mills did not have Americans in mind at all. He was responding to developments in Britain, in Eastern Bloc countries such as Poland and Hungary, and in Latin America. His next book, “Listen, Yankee,” was a defense of Castro’s revolution. Those were the young intellectuals he was referring to.

Nevertheless, Hayden was inspired to compose his own “Letter to the New (Young) Left,” in which he complained about the “endless repressions of free speech and thought” on campus and “the stifling paternalism that infects the student’s whole perception of what is real and possible.” Students needed to organize, he said. They could draw on “what remains of the adult labor, academic and political communities,” but it was to be a student movement. “Young,” in Hayden’s “Letter,” meant “student.”

What was needed, Hayden said, was not a new political program. What was needed was a radical style . “Radicalism of style demands that we oppose delusions and be free,” he wrote. “It demands that we change our life.” Not having a program meant keeping the future “up for grabs.” This approach meant that direct actions, like campus sit-ins, undertaken for one cause (for example, abolishing R.O.T.C.) would find themselves being piggybacked by very different causes (for example, stopping university expansion into Black neighborhoods, as happened at Columbia in 1968 and Harvard in 1969). Demands kept multiplying. This was not because events got out of the organizers’ control. It was the way the New Left was designed. Policies weren’t the problem. The system was the problem.

Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, the S.D.S. convention at which Hayden’s statement was adopted was held at an educational camp in Port Huron, Michigan, that had been loaned to the group by the United Auto Workers. For the Port Huron Statement represents the American left’s farewell to the labor movement. The statement did end up containing a section supporting unions, but that was added at the demand of the students’ League for Industrial Democracy sponsors. Critical remarks about the Soviet Union were added for the same reason. Yet those preoccupations—the working class and Stalinism—were precisely what the students wanted to be rid of. “Dead issues,” Casey Hayden called the concern about Communism. “I didn’t know any communists, only their children, who were just part of our gang.” The students did not think of themselves as pro-Communist. They thought of themselves as anti-anti-Communist. To older left-wing intellectuals, that amounted to the same thing. Hence the New Left slogan “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It meant “Don’t trust an old socialist.”

The Port Huron convention began on June 12, 1962, with fifty-nine registered participants from S.D.S.’s eleven chapters. (There were eventually more than three hundred. The military escalation of the war in Vietnam, beginning in 1965, turbocharged the movement, particularly among male students, who were subject to the draft.) Participatory democracy—“democracy is in the streets”—and authenticity were the core principles of Hayden’s forty-nine-page draft. In that spirit, the delegates debated the entire document, section by section. “The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic,” the statement says. Since pure democracy and genuine authenticity are conditions that can only be reached for, never fully achieved, this was a formula for lifelong commitment. It asked you to question everything.

Still, the statement does not call for revolution or even an end to capitalism. Its politics are progressive: regulate private enterprise, shift spending from arms to domestic needs, expand democratic participation in the workplace and public policymaking, support decolonization movements, and advance civil rights by ridding the Democratic Party of its Southern segregationists, the Dixiecrats. (That problem took care of itself in the 1964 Presidential election, when the South began to flip from blue to red.)

But the statement begins and ends with the university:

Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic. The questions we might want raised—what is really important? Can we live in a different and better way? If we wanted to change society, how would we do it?—are not thought to be questions of a “fruitful, empirical nature,” and thus are brushed aside.

The university has become a mechanism of social reproduction. It “ ‘prepares’ the student for ‘citizenship’ through perpetual rehearsals and, usually, through emasculation of what creative spirit there is in the individual. . . . That which is studied, the social reality, is ‘objectified’ to sterility, dividing the student from life.” And academic research serves the power élite. “Many social and physical scientists,” the statement says, “neglecting the liberating heritage of higher learning, develop ‘human relations’ or ‘morale-producing’ techniques for the corporate economy, while others exercise their intellectual skills to accelerate the arms race.” These functions are all masked by the academic ideology of disinterestedness.

At the end of the statement, though, the university is reimagined as “a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.” Academics can perform the role that Mills accused American intellectuals of abandoning: enlightening the public. For this to happen, students and faculty, in alliance, “must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. . . . They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life.”

The Port Huron deliberations lasted three days. They ended at dawn. Hayden was elected president of S.D.S. (Haber was happy to return to being an undergraduate), and the delegates walked together to the shore of Lake Huron, where they stood in silence, holding hands. “It was exalting,” one of them, Sharon Jeffrey, said later. “We felt that we were different, and that we were going to do things differently. We thought that we knew what had to be done, and that we were going to do it. It felt like the dawn of a new age.”

Tom Hayden’s charisma was the cool kind. He was lucid and unflappable. Mario Savio’s charisma was hot. Savio’s gifts were as a speaker, not as a negotiator. He channelled anger. Savio’s politics, like Hayden’s, were a kind of existentialist anti-politics. “I am not a political person,” he said in 1965, a few months after becoming famous as the face of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (F.S.M.), something most people would have called political. “What was it Kierkegaard said about free acts? They’re the ones that, looking back, you realize you couldn’t help doing.”

Savio was born in New York City in 1942. His family were immigrants, and Italian was his first language. When he learned English, he developed a fairly severe speech impediment, which may have helped make possible his later renown as the greatest orator of the American New Left, since he was forced to concentrate on his enunciation.

Savio entered Berkeley as a junior. The campus appealed to him in part because he had heard about the student protests against HUAC that had been broken up with fire hoses. His first campus political activity was attending meetings of the University Friends of SNCC . He agitated for civil rights in the Bay Area, and in 1964 he went to Mississippi to participate in Freedom Summer. Soon after he returned to Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement began.

It seemed to erupt spontaneously. That was part of its appeal and part of its mystique: no one planned it, and no one ran it. It had no connection to S.D.S. or any other national political group. The reason is that the F.S.M. was a parochial affair. It was not a war for social justice. It was a war against the university administration.

The fuse had been lit long before 1964. The administration’s tensions with faculty dated to a controversy over loyalty oaths in 1949, which had led to the firing of thirty-one professors; its tensions with students dated to the emergence of an activist organization that participated in student-government elections in the late fifties.

The administration was hostile to political activity on campus for two reasons. The first had to do with the principle of disinterestedness, which called for partisan politics to be kept out of scholarship and the classroom. But there was a more pragmatic reason as well. U.C. administrators were wary of the system’s Board of Regents, many of whom were conservative businessmen. Joseph McCarthy was dead, but HUAC , though increasingly zombie-like, lumbered on. So political activity on campus was banned or tightly regulated—not only student organizations, leafletting, and the like but also outside political speakers. It wasn’t that administrators did not want dissent. It was that they did not want trouble.

Until the fall semester in 1964, students had been allowed to set up tables representing political causes on a twenty-six-foot strip of sidewalk just outside campus, on the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way. One day, a vice-chancellor, Alex C. Sherriffs, whose office was in Sproul Hall, the administration building that adjoined the area with the tables, decided that the spectacle was a bad look for the university. He conveyed his concern to his colleagues, and on September 16th the university announced a ban on tables and political activities on that stretch of sidewalk.

Representatives of student organizations, when their appeals proved unavailing, began picketing. On September 30th, in violation of the ban, organizations set up tables at Sather Gate, on the Berkeley campus. University officials took the names of students who were staffing tables and informed them they would be disciplined. Students responded by staging a brief sit-in outside the dean’s office. The next day, tables were set up again on campus and, at 11:45 a.m. , university police arrested Jack Weinberg for trespassing.

Weinberg was a former Berkeley mathematics student who had been soliciting funds for the Congress of Racial Equality at the foot of the steps to Sproul Hall. (He was also the person who coined the slogan about not trusting anyone over thirty.) When he was arrested, he went limp, and officers placed him in a police car that had been driven into the middle of Sproul Plaza. Students immediately surrounded the car; eventually, there were more than seven thousand people in the plaza. Some of them climbed onto the roof, with Weinberg still inside, to make speeches. That roof was where Savio made his oratorical début. Weinberg remained sitting in that car until seven-thirty the next evening.

While he was there, student leaders met with administrators, now led by the president of the entire U.C. system, Clark Kerr, and negotiated an agreement for handling Weinberg, the students who had been disciplined for violating the ban on tables, and the students who were preventing the police from moving the car. The agreement also revisited the rules for on-campus political activities.

Kerr was the perfect antagonist for Savio, because Kerr had literally written the book on the postwar university: “ The Uses of the University ,” published in 1963. “The Uses of the University” basically transcribes three lectures Kerr gave at Harvard, in which he described the transformations in higher education that led to what he called “the multiversity” or “the federal grant university.” The text became a bible for educators, revised and reprinted five times. Savio called Kerr “the foremost ideologist of [the] ‘Brave New World’ conception of education.”

As his book’s title suggests, Kerr’s view of the university was instrumental. The institution could grow and become all things to all people because it was intertwined with the state. It operated as a factory for the production of knowledge and of future knowledge producers. In the nineteen-sixties, undergraduate enrollments doubled, but the number of doctoral degrees awarded tripled. These graduate students were the experts, Kerr thought, that society needed. The president of a modern university, he argued, is therefore basically a mediator.

“Mediator” was a term Kerr later regretted using, for it exposed exactly the weakness that Hayden and Savio had identified in higher education: the absence of values, the soullessness of the institution. Kerr was not unmindful of this grievance. The transformation of the university had done undergraduates “little good,” he admitted. “The students find themselves under a blanket of impersonal rules for admissions, for scholarships, for examinations, for degrees. It is interesting to watch how a faculty intent on few rules for itself can fashion such a plethora of them for the students.”

“Interesting to watch” is mediator talk. Kerr even had a premonition of how the problem might play out. “If federal grants for research brought a major revolution,” he wrote, “then the resultant student sense of neglect may bring a minor counterrevolt, although the target of the revolt is a most elusive one.” Unless, of course, the university gives the students the target. A ban on tables was such a target.

Child about to eat a giant ice cream sundae but doesn't want the cherry on top.

The students involved in the Sproul Plaza “stand-in” didn’t trust Kerr. They suspected he would manipulate the processes he had agreed to so that the students could be disciplined and restrictions on political activity would remain. They probably were right: Kerr seems to have underestimated the strength of student support for the activists all along. So the activists continued to strategize, and, amid the action, they came up with a name for their movement.

“The Free Speech Movement” was an inspired choice. The students didn’t really want free speech, or only free speech. They wanted institutional and social change. But they pursued a tactic aimed at co-opting the faculty. The faculty had good reasons for caution about associating themselves with controversial political positions. But free speech was what the United States stood for. It was the banner carried into the battles against McCarthyism and loyalty oaths. Free speech was a cause no liberal could in good conscience resist.

Another way to gain faculty support was to get the administration to call in the police. No faculty wants campus disputes resolved by state force. At Berkeley, this was especially true for émigré professors, who knew what it was like to live in a police state. Astonishingly, the administration walked right into the trap.

The F.S.M. continued to hold rallies in Sproul Plaza, using the university’s own sound equipment. And since most students walked through the plaza at some point, the rallies attracted large crowds. Tables reappeared on campus, and the organizers were sometimes summoned for disciplinary action and sometimes not. On November 20th, three thousand people marched from Sather Gate to University Hall, where a meeting of the regents was taking place. Five F.S.M. representatives were let in but were not allowed to speak. By then, the F.S.M. had attracted members of the faculty and a range of students, from the conservative Mona Hutchin, of the Young Republicans, to the communist revolutionary Bob Avakian. Free speech was a cause that united them all.

Then Kerr overplayed his hand. On November 28th, disciplinary action was announced against Savio and another student, Arthur Goldberg, for the entrapment of the police car on October 1st, among other malfeasances. On December 1st, the F.S.M. demanded that the charges against Savio and Goldberg be dropped, that restrictions on political speech be abolished, and that the administration refrain from further disciplining students for political activity. If these demands were not met, the group promised to take “direct action.”

The demands were not met. A huge rally was held in Sproul Plaza the next day, leading to the occupation of Sproul Hall by a thousand people. Before they entered the building, Savio gave a speech, recorded and broadcast by KPFA, in Berkeley. He depicted the university as an industrial firm, with autocratic governance:

I ask you to consider: If this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors; and if President Kerr in fact is the manager; then I’ll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be—have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product. Don’t mean . . . Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings! There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels . . . upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

The transformation of students at élite universities into a new working class (with an echo of Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times”) was complete.

As Joan Baez sang “We Shall Overcome” (a civil-rights anthem, but originally a song of the labor movement), the students proceeded to occupy the four floors of Sproul Hall. Shortly after three o’clock the following morning, hundreds of police officers stormed the building and arrested about eight hundred people, the largest mass arrest in California history. Protesters passively resisted; police responded by throwing the men down the stairs. It was not until 4 p.m. that the last protester was removed.

There was a meeting of more than eight hundred professors and instructors, and they voted by an overwhelming margin to support the students’ demands. On January 2, 1965, the regents announced the replacement of the school’s chancellor, and a liberal policy on political activity was unveiled the next day, a clear signal of capitulation. Unrest at Berkeley was by no means at an end. The war in Vietnam would see to that. Nor were the repercussions over. In 1967, Savio served four months in prison for his role in the Sproul Hall sit-in. But Kerr had done what the F.S.M. had hoped he would do: he had radicalized the faculty.

The movement that started in Port Huron and Berkeley soon got sucked into the political maelstrom of the late sixties. In March, 1965, the United States began its immense bombing campaign against North Vietnam, Operation Rolling Thunder. That month, marines landed near Da Nang, the first American combat troops in Vietnam. By 1968, there would be more than half a million American soldiers there. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael introduced the slogan “Black Power” and replaced John Lewis as the chairman of SNCC , which began turning away white volunteers. The Black Panther Party was founded the same year. The women’s movement and, after 1969, the gay-liberation movement, representing subordinated groups that the New Left had given little attention to, occupied center stage. Militancy took over, liberals were driven away, and American politics descended into chaos.

In retrospect, the New Left’s break with the labor movement seems a disastrous, maybe an arrogant, miscalculation. So does its support for the Hanoi regime, which, after it finally united the country, in 1975, turned Vietnam into a totalitarian state. But the New Left never had any political cards to play. It was always a student movement. Today, the left has the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to turn its ideals into policy. There was no such wing in 1962.

Still, the spirit of Port Huron and the F.S.M. was not forgotten. The students involved had experienced a feeling of personal liberation through group solidarity, a largely illusory but genuinely moving sense that the world was turning under their marching feet. That sense—the sense that your words and actions matter, that you matter—is what inspires people to take risks, and gives movements for change their momentum.

“What can I call it: the existential amazement of being at The Edge, where reality breaks open into the true Chaos before it is reformed?” one of the F.S.M. leaders, Michael Rossman, wrote ten years later:

I never found words to describe what is still my most vivid feeling from the FSM . . . the sense that the surface of reality had somehow fallen away altogether. Nothing was any longer what it had seemed. Objects, encounters, events, all became mysterious, pregnant with unnamable implications, capable of astounding metamorphosis.

The music historian Greil Marcus was a Berkeley undergraduate in 1964. He described the experience of rallies and mass meetings this way:

Your own history was lying in pieces on the ground, and you had the choice of picking up the pieces or passing them by. Nothing was trivial, nothing incidental. Everything connected to a totality, and the totality was how you wanted to live: as a subject or as an object of history. . . . As the conversation expanded, institutional, historical power dissolved. People did and said things that made their lives of a few weeks before seem unreal—they did and said things that, not long after, would seem ever more so.

These reminiscences may seem romantic. They are romantic. But they express the core premise of left-wing thought, the core premise of Marx: Things do not have to be the way they are.

The nation was at a crossroads in the nineteen-sixties. The system did not break, but it did bend. We are at another crossroads today. It can be made to bend again. ♦

An earlier version of this story misstated the birthplace of Mario Savio’s mother, and the extent of the Republican victory in the South in the 1964 Presidential election.

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E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics

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E. P. Thompson is a towering figure in the field of labor history, best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class . But as this collection shows, Thompson was much more than a historian: he was a dedicated educator of workers, a brilliant polemicist, a skilled political theorist, and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons, and for a rebirth of the socialist project.

The essays in this book, many of which are either out-of-print or difficult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963 during one of the most fertile periods of Thompson’s intellectual and political life, when he wrote his two great works, The Making of the English Working Class and William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary . They reveal Thompson’s insistence on the vitality of a humanistic and democratic socialism along with the value of utopian thinking in radical politics. Throughout, Thompson struggles to open a space independent of official Communist Parties and reformist Social Democratic Parties, opposing them with a vision of socialism built from the bottom up. Editor Cal Winslow, who studied with Thompson, provides context for the essays in a detailed introduction and reminds us why this eloquent and inspiring voice remains so relevant to us today.

Also available from Monthly Review Press: The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays by E. P. Thompson

This collection introduces readers to the thought of an outstanding left historian who combined commitment with original and open-minded inquiry. Thompson’s brilliance and wit transformed the scope of working class history internationally, documenting how the action of human beings had shaped the present. Equally engaged in the creation of new forms of left politics as a libertarian socialist, his writings are indispensable weapons for a new generation of activists struggling to reinvent radicalism.

—Sheila Rowbotham, author, Dreamers of a New Day

Thompson led a cometary life as teacher, protester, and socialist historian. Cal Winslow’s invaluable anthology—a gift to the new generation—includes the legendary essays that were so seminal to the emergence of the English New Left in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They exemplify the polemical precision and moral clarity with which EPT opposed both dogma and concession in his quest to recover the soul of the English revolutionary tradition.

—Mike Davis, author, In Praise of Barbarians

Through this timely, well-chosen collection of Edward Thompson’s political and historical essays, Cal Winslow gives vital new life to one of the most creative radical thinkers and activists of the twentieth century.

—Marcus Rediker, author, The Amistad Rebellion

What gift in these troubled times! The full range of Edward Thompson’s work is represented here, a reminder of what a public intellectual should be. This collection educates and inspires.

—John Gillis, author, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History

E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) is among the most acclaimed historians of the twentieth century. He is known for his works The Making of the English Working Class , William Morris , and The Poverty of Theory , among others.

A longtime labor, antiwar, and peace activist and educator, Cal Winslow is currently a Fellow in Environmental History in the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley and Director of the Mendocino Institute, a not-for-profit research and educational center. He was trained at Antioch College and Warwick University where he studied under the direction of E.P. Thompson. His most recent book is Labor’s Civil War in California .

E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics

Publication Date: July 2014

Number of Pages: 288

Paperback ISBN: 9781583674437

Cloth ISBN: 9781583674444

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Vanishing Act

The Intellectual Situation

Walk Away Like a Boss
Sarah Resnick
Lab-Leak Theory and the “Asiatic” Form
National Nightmare
Nausicaa Renner
Elena Kostyuchenko
Unfree Associations
Hannah Zeavin
Digital Rocks
Will Tavlin

Fiction and Drama

The Two Imams
Zain Khalid

New Left Review

Shadow and Light
Haley Mlotek
The Everything Snore
Radical Narcissist
Buffettspotting
The Editors

Who did neoliberalism?

Published in Issue 42 : Vanishing Act

Publication date Spring 2022

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Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora. The Last Man Takes LSD. Verso, 2021.

Terence Renaud. New Lefts. Princeton University Press, 2021.

Paul Sabin. Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. W. W. Norton, 2021.

Joseph Schumpeter thought, with some justification, that he was not like other intellectuals. For one thing, they were poor—“psychically unemployable in manual occupations.” The typical intellectual also struggled to find work in the white-collar professions, Schumpeter wrote in his 1942 chef d’oeuvre, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy . The problem was the “vigorous expansion of the education apparatus” witnessed in “the later stages of capitalist civilization,” which doomed most graduates to fungibility. Schumpeter himself, however, was able to rise above the herd and seize a lucrative economics professorship at Harvard in the early 1930s. His good fortune, he felt, gave him a firsthand acquaintance with the virtues of the capitalist class, but the also-rans were condemned to watch from the outside with mounting resentment. Hence the “critical attitude” and “thoroughly discontented frame of mind” that characterized most intellectuals. They had no sympathy for the social traditions that conservatives like Schumpeter held dear. They scorned the bourgeois family and experimented with alternative gender relations. They “invaded labor politics” and poisoned the minds of workers with their own antagonisms. They concocted newfangled theories like Marxism, through which would-be planners sought to substitute their own intellectual prowess for the spontaneous order of the market. In short, the “freedom of public discussion” they sought to encourage was really just the “freedom to nibble at the foundations of capitalist society.”

If Schumpeter’s analysis of the intelligentsia was histrionic and conspiracy-theoretical in tone, its substance was actually pretty banal. Ever since the Dreyfus affair of Third Republic France, when intelligentsia entered everyday usage, the intellectual per se was understood to carry an element of the subversive; to possess loyalties that were cosmopolitan and principled rather than pragmatic and rooted in the soil; to prefer thinking to working and therefore to have a hard time behaving like a team player in modern capitalist societies. In his 1929 book Ideology and Utopia , arguably the world’s first treatise on the sociology of intellectual life, the Hungarian social theorist Karl Mannheim extolled the ability of the “free-floating intelligentsia” to transcend the determination of thought by social location—to enter the perspective of other classes and envision utopian alternatives to the present order.

Schumpeter and Mannheim, despite their divergent sympathies, both picked up on the important role of intellectuals in the left wing antifascist movements of the late 1920s and ’30s, the heyday of what Michael Denning has called the Cultural Front. In a brief for the 1932 USA Communist Party presidential ticket, the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford issued the era’s most emphatic statement on the conflict between authentic intellectualism and the capitalist status quo. “It is our business to think and we shall not permit business men to teach us our business,” the pamphlet insisted. “No genuine culture can thrive in a society in which malnutrition is a natural cause of death, the exploitation of man by man the natural cause of wealth, and foreign war and domestic terror the natural means of retaining political power.” The cause of revolution—even the proletarian revolution imagined by the CPUSA—was the cause of cultural and intellectual renewal, and vice versa.

By the late 20th century, many of these fears, hopes, and prophecies had come to seem faintly ridiculous, or even incomprehensible. The problem was that in the 1960s, the long-anticipated mass movement of anticapitalist intellectuals finally materialized. In the United States and throughout Western Europe, there erupted a New Left, as it came to be known. The term originated to describe British Communist Party defectors and dissidents such as E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, and Perry Anderson, who blended an antiauthoritarian socialist political strategy with a commitment to critical engagement with heterodox Marxist theorists from the continent, including Herbert Marcuse and his Frankfurt School colleagues, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser (Anderson’s lodestar, Thompson’s nemesis). Soon the term broadened to include student movements in the US and West Germany that focused their ire on the pathologies of university bureaucracy and the Vietnam War. The social basis for these movements was the postwar higher education boom, which dramatically expanded the availability of a “free-floating” intellectual identity in both quantitative and qualitative terms.

In the late 1960s, the movement seemed to reach its apex in a transnational eruption of labor militancy shaped in part by the activity of radical intellectuals. Amid the Parisian general strike of May 1968, posters appeared that read “Universités, Usines, Union” (Universities, Factories, Union). The aspirations of the circle of radical autoworker-intellectuals that formed around C. L. R. James in Detroit in the 1950s finally materialized in a series of Black-led wildcat strikes throughout area plants, culminating in the 1969 formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The multiracial ringleaders of the wave of rank-and-file labor insurgency that besieged GM’s state-of-the-art Lordstown, Ohio, plant in the early 1970s captivated journalists with their youth and long hair. Here it was, it appeared, at last: a coalition of antiauthoritarian campus denizens, professional agitators, and outcast rebels—in alliance, at its moments of greatest power, with the younger and more radical segments of the industrial working class—was challenging the militarism, bureaucracy, alienation, and (at least rhetorically) racism and patriarchy endemic to contemporary capitalist societies. But it failed.

It is simply not the case that when Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer knelt in the Capitol wearing kente stoles, they were consummating some chain of events set in motion long ago by Michel Foucault. Tweet

But since the movement’s waning days, some critics have charged that the New Left’s apparent failure served to disguise a more insidious form of success. In this account, New Leftists unwittingly helped to usher in neoliberalism by shattering a midcentury social-democratic consensus that was more fragile than they realized. The values they rallied behind ended up forming the moral vocabulary of a new era of hyper-capitalism—a “New Spirit of Capitalism,” as the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello put it, looking back from the 1990s on the legacy of the soixante-huitards. Freedom and individuality became the rhetorical cornerstones of Reaganism and Thatcherism; the critique of technocratic management spilled over into a post-truth war on science; rejection of the work ethic metastasized into a narcissistic consumer culture; faith in the emancipatory power of intellectualism gave cover to the left’s alleged abandonment of the working class and anticipated patterns of educational polarization in our politics today. As Alasdair MacIntyre summarized in a 1969 critique of Herbert Marcuse, “To be in conflict with the established order is not necessarily to be an agent of liberation.”

This story, tracing the roots of neoliberalism back to the mistakes of the New Left, has resurfaced in recent years as questions about how we got into our current mess and what role the left should play in charting a path out of it have taken on a new urgency. Failing to appreciate the full implications of their rejection of the inheritance of the Old Left, the radicals of the 1960s apparently unleashed, Sorcerer’s Apprentice–like, a wave of negation that they could not curb before it devoured the accomplishments of the midcentury welfare state. Now even the journals of the renascent socialist movement denounce the “rejection of norms” supposedly espoused by earlier radicals—lest we forget, as the historian Anton Jäger put it in an interview, “the recuperation of this new left sensibility by neoliberalism.”

It’s simple, these critics say: Stop rejecting norms and focus on defending the right ones. Don’t try to tear down the system; identify the parts of the system that are working already and build on them. Leave the realm of personal life alone, shut up about your new ideas about how people ought to live their lives, and emphasize the bread-and-butter issues that matter to normal people. The New Left tried intellectualism, and it failed. Joseph Schumpeter would have been relieved to learn that he had nothing to worry about after all.

Herbert Marcuse used to be the intellectual mascot for the unintended consequences of the New Left. Today it’s Michel Foucault. His chief prosecutor is the Belgian sociologist Daniel Zamora, whose first volley came in a volume coedited with Michael Behrent, published in English in 2016 as Foucault and Neoliberalism . The campaign has since continued in a variety of periodicals and culminated this year in a new monograph with Mitchell Dean, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution .

One objective of all this work is spelled out in the original French title of Foucault and Neoliberalism : Critiquer Foucault (“Criticizing Foucault”). Zamora seems to significantly overestimate the transgressive character of this project. “Can We Criticize Foucault?” read the title of a 2014 interview with him in Jacobin . The answer, of course, is yes, which explains why Foucault has been criticized extensively since the ink dried on his first writings. Leftists as well as conservatives have gotten in on the fun: Jean-Paul Sartre, a New Left intellectual if there ever was one, called Foucault “the last barricade of the bourgeoisie” in 1966; Nancy Fraser weighed Foucault’s mixture of “empirical insights and normative confusions” in a famous paper in 1981, the same year that the Frankfurt School luminary Jürgen Habermas witheringly referred to him as a “young conservative.” It’s hard to know who Dean and Zamora are imagining will clutch their pearls at the climactic announcement of their new book: “When we use Foucault today, we can no longer imagine that we have entered a safe haven or that his name invokes an intellectual insurance policy against analytical missteps or political enthusiasms.”

Perhaps this is why editors at the Guardian teased readers with intimations of a more ambitious argument in their headline for a précis of Dean and Zamora’s book: “Today, the self is the battlefield of politics. Blame Michel Foucault.” Now that really would be a remarkable discovery, since Foucault is hardly the first thinker to come to mind when casting about for a plausible intellectual source behind our present calamity. Unfortunately, it appears that Dean and Zamora don’t really have their hearts in this particular claim, probably because it is impossible to defend for very long with a straight face. It is simply not the case that when Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer knelt in the Capitol wearing kente stoles amid last summer’s uprising, they were consummating some chain of events set in motion long ago by Michel Foucault. I refuse to believe that anyone seriously thinks this.

The good news is that, lacking the evidence to frame Foucault as the long-neglected éminence grise (chauve?) of neoliberalism, Dean and Zamora instead devote the bulk of The Last Man Takes LSD to a rigorous and occasionally sympathetic intellectual biography of Foucault in the 1970s and ’80s. They have given us the most detailed and sophisticated account to date of the shifting problematics of Foucault’s thought in his late period, and a compelling explanation of why Foucault did in fact become interested enough in neoliberalism to analyze it at length in the 1978–1979 Collège de France lecture series published as The Birth of Biopolitics .

Dean and Zamora show how Foucault left behind the crypto-structuralism of his early work, with its prediction that the humanist subject would soon disappear like a face drawn in sand on the beach, and embraced a new interest in subjective experience and the liberatory potential of new modes of individuality (encapsulated for Dean and Zamora by the titular acid trip Foucault undertook in Death Valley in 1975). And they connect his enthusiasm for the proliferation of nonnormative forms of selfhood to his increasingly vocal criticism of the French welfare state and the institutions of the postwar left. When Foucault began reading the work of neoliberals like the Chicago economist Gary Becker, it was in search of a new governmentality for the left—by which Foucault meant an art or technique of governing, as opposed to a set of normative objectives for governance. Foucault came to believe that a proper governmentality was just what the left was missing: contemporary socialism was undone by its dependence on a state-centric governmentality it had inherited unthinkingly from its ideological predecessors. But the neoliberals, in Foucault’s understanding, claimed to have invented a new governmentality that, unlike its competitors, did not require the use of disciplinary institutions to produce subjects who conformed to a particular way of life. In the abstraction of the neoliberals’ market logic (as Foucault read it), invidious distinctions between normal and perverse, criminal and law-abiding, and productive and lazy all dissolved into matters of individual choice. For someone who desperately sought the end of that sort of distinction-making, and who despaired at its persistence in the discourse of the contemporary left, the neoliberals’ efforts were worthy of serious consideration.

There is much that we might learn from this narrative. Dean and Zamora’s exegesis and contextualization of some of Foucault’s most arcane theoretical texts help return the birth of French theory, practically a shorthand for ivory-tower obscurity, to the tumultuous political history from which it emerged. Their sketch of Foucault’s pathway to a sympathetic interest in neoliberalism illuminates the inadequacies of the postwar French welfare state—so often romanticized in today’s nostalgia for Les Trente Glorieuses—that drove Foucault and many of his contemporaries on the French left away from the statism of the French Communist Party (PCF). Even Foucault’s friend and teacher Louis Althusser, who remained within the PCF fold, excoriated its evolution into a government party and encouraged it to pivot to action outside of the state. In the 1960s and ’70s, the PCF and the social-democratic Socialist Party seemed incapable of pushing the French state past its commitment to militarism and imperialism, a reactionary politics of gender and sexuality, and an economic managerialism that counterbalanced the rule of the market with the rule of technical experts rather than the self-activity of workers. No wonder the ears of some French leftists perked up when neoliberals started talking about the need to contain the excesses of the state, or about the joys of entrepreneurship, as an alternative to the drudgery of corporate hierarchy.

But Dean and Zamora hardly succeed in presenting proof that there’s some fundamental neoliberal contaminant lurking at the heart of Foucault’s thought. “While neoliberalism is often imagined as an ideology imposed by the Right,” Dean and Zamora claim, “its most effective agents have often been precisely those intellectual elements and parties of the Left that managed to articulate the desire for autonomy against the disciplinary forces of the welfare state with the new forms of regulation rooted in a market rationality.” Why Foucault’s interest in the writings of the Chicago School—made understandable by Dean and Zamora’s own deft work of contextualization—made him a more effective “agent” for neoliberalism than the Chicago School itself (much less the IMF, or the CIA, or Ronald Reagan, or NAFTA, or Walmart . . .) is left as an exercise for the reader.

If nothing else, it is good to remember that J. Edgar Hoover and Charles de Gaulle certainly did not regard the New Left as tame neoliberals-in-waiting. Tweet

The frequency with which Dean and Zamora highlight aspects of Foucault’s approach to sexuality as evidence of his sympathy for neoliberalism becomes troubling as the book progresses. We hear that Foucault abandoned the PCF in part because of its “long history of homophobia,” which is a useful enough act of historicization until you remember that the purpose of all this historicization is to make us regard Foucault as an agent of neoliberalism. Then we find out that there was a mysterious affinity among Foucault’s enthusiasms in the 1970s, “from the ‘political spirituality’ of the Iranian revolution, to the ‘gay lifestyle’ invented in California, to the rise of a neoliberal governmentality.” It turns out that “the ‘gay culture’ that seemed to fascinate him” was the proving ground of Foucault’s putatively neoliberal belief that “the self was now the crucial place where we could produce . . . new ways of living in the world.” A particularly bizarre passage analogizes the “economic tests of neoliberalism” to the “S&M practices” that Foucault undertook “in the legendary clubs of the ‘leather scene,’” which Dean and Zamora describe with all the lurid detail of a Rod Dreher blog post: “These ‘member only’ clubs offered jail cells, dungeons, and various fantasy environments in which to explore more extreme pleasures.”

It’s difficult to know exactly what Dean and Zamora are trying to say in passages like these because they are surprisingly reticent about their own positive political vision. It is clear only that they are against “antistatism” and in favor of “policies that curtail the growth of inequality.” After they give Foucault so much grief for his critiques of Marxism and communism, you’d be forgiven for finding this sort of pronouncement a little anticlimactic. Ironically, their conflation of neoliberalism with antistatism recapitulates Foucault’s own pivotal mistake in his assessment of neoliberalism. Foucault thought that the left might learn something from neoliberal governmentality precisely because he hearkened to the antistatist and antinormative rhetorical flourishes of certain key intellectuals while neglecting the enduring, even intensifying reliance of other neoliberal theorists and practitioners on precisely the same disciplinary institutions that Foucault despised—including the state. The wreckage of the neoliberal revolution would be littered with prisons and detention centers, black sites and body armor, workfare and means-testing, health insurance claims agents and heteropatriarchal public health agencies. Neoliberalism has been an era of family values and antidemocratic projects for global governance. Perhaps above all else it has been an era of wars: wars on crime, on drugs, on terror; forever wars.

But if Foucault failed to anticipate the contours of actually existing neoliberalism, its full fury is oddly absent from the pages of Dean and Zamora’s critique. “Neoliberalism has become a series of rogue affects,” they write, lapsing into the same dematerialized culture-critique they find objectionable in Foucault. It is an array of “tribal identifications formed through the ordeals and tests that mark, tattoo, mould, and dress bodies in the pleasures of the enterprise, paraded in its different paradigms by a series of families that cross political divides: the Trumps, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Macrons, the Kardashians.” This sort of aesthetic sneer is hardly more faithful to the state-smashing revolutionary legacy of Marx and Lenin than Foucault’s late work.

The historian Paul Sabin is more interested in deregulation than he is in the Kardashians. His new book, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism , provides a revelatory account of the contribution of public-interest advocacy groups in the 1960s and ’70s to the unmaking of the postwar American regulatory state. The ambiguous antihero of the book is Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, attorney, author, nonprofit executive, gadfly, and, in Sabin’s telling, a single-minded crusader with little appreciation of the Pyrrhic quality of his victories against government and corporate bureaucrats.

Sabin doesn’t fault Nader and his public-interest comrades for concluding that there was something deeply broken about the relationship between business and government in the postwar decades, the appearance of social-democratic advance notwithstanding. Big business proved willing to tolerate new government regulatory agencies in large part because they knew their guys could always get their foot in the door when it really mattered. Corporations with monopolistic aspirations, most glaringly in the airline industry, realized they could actually benefit from regulations that imposed costs they could pay easily but that were fatally burdensome for smaller competitors. Private business—dam-builders like Kaiser and Bechtel, the real-life Montgomery Burnses in the atomic energy industry—profited handsomely, through opaque cronyistic mechanisms, from midcentury public works programs, which occasionally had devastating ecological consequences to boot. Power was wielded in back rooms choked with cigar smoke and inaccessible to ordinary citizens. The economy grew, the soil was poisoned, thalidomide babies made headlines, poverty persisted, and people stopped believing that conventional politics could help them. American political culture, the sociologist David Riesman argued in his 1950 best seller The Lonely Crowd , was increasingly characterized by “the indifference of people who know enough about politics to reject it.”

Into this conjuncture, Sabin argues, Nader and contemporaries like Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs arrived like Old Testament prophets, raising awareness of the hidden costs of the affluent society and galvanizing new forms of activism that sought to hold both business and government accountable. Carson and Jacobs, it should be said, don’t get much airtime in the book despite their appearance in the dust jacket blurb—perhaps because Carson died in 1964 and Jacobs left the United States in 1968. In any event, it was Nader’s 1965 automobile safety crusade that provided the main template for the public-interest movement, Sabin’s central subject. The public-interest concept was capacious enough to encompass Nader-style consumer protection campaigns, as well as issues in environmental and urban politics of the sort that Carson and Jacobs focused on. With the backing of liberal philanthropists, independent law firms dedicated to corporate oversight and environmental defense proliferated in the 1960s and ’70s alongside nonprofit groups of researcher-advocates who helped organize campaigns around particular high-profile issues. The result, initially, was a flurry of new federal regulatory activity in the late ’60s and early ’70s, dovetailing with a swell of public enthusiasm for consumer and environmental protection. Nader and his groups scored wins in quick succession on automobile safety, meat safety, natural gas pipeline safety, and radiation safety. To placate the growing environmental movement, Nixon created a new regulator, the EPA, and signed the 1970 amendments to the Clean Air Act, arguably the most significant piece of environmental legislation ever enacted up to that point.

As the ’70s wore on, however, a different side of the public interest movement came into view. Composed almost exclusively of college graduates, often from elite universities and with advanced degrees, the public interest rank-and-file frequently looked down on alternative approaches to political change-making that had a distastefully plebeian air—whether “lobby, ballot box, or protest,” as the Environmental Defense Fund put it in 1970. The movement’s aspirations to professionalization also resulted in a grueling work environment redolent of the corporate pit. Nader himself was a particularly tyrannical boss: when asked by an interviewer how many hours each week he expected his staffers to work, he quipped, “the ideal is 100.”

The distance between the public interest movement and the organizations of the working class was encapsulated in Nader’s frequent equation of the public with consumers. If unions spoke for the workers, lobbyists spoke for the businessmen, the government spoke for the politicians, and the Lorax spoke for the trees, Ralph Nader would speak for the consumers. In the 1960s, this task entailed the creation of new regulations, but by the late ’70s it increasingly meant their elimination, in the name of lowering prices. Nader enthusiastically backed the trucking and airline deregulation legislation signed by Carter on the doorstep of the Reagan revolution. Perhaps most significantly—although not emphasized by Sabin—Nader became a vocal inflation hawk. “To the many business and governmental managers, ‘inflation’ is seen as a value-free word, much like the word ‘gravity,’” Nader asserted, ludicrously, in 1979. “To consumers, however, inflation . . . is, as any proverbial cabdriver can tell you, getting less for your money.” To this day, Nader continues to extoll the legacy of Paul Volcker, the Carter-appointed Fed chairman who sought to suppress the inflation of the ’70s by triggering a wave of recession and unemployment that eviscerated the remnants of the industrial labor movement.

By chronicling Nader’s surprising ideological peregrination, Sabin provides a useful counterweight to narratives of the rise of neoliberalism that emphasize the cabal-like activity of a small right-wing vanguard. Unfortunately, Sabin maps the narrative of his book onto the hackneyed unintended-consequences-of-the-New-Left grid. This entirely unnecessary argument only serves to flatten the complexity of the story he’s actually told, and it obscures our understanding of why Nader and his allies fought on the same side as Volcker and the Carter-era deregulators when plenty of their contemporaries among the activist movements of the ’60s did not.

It is true that capitalism has never met a utopia it couldn’t market. Tweet

There is an answer hidden here, but it is not one that Sabin draws out in Public Citizens . It is contained in the word liberal . Throughout the book, Sabin uses the word interchangeably with leftist . And liberalism certainly loomed large in the American movements of the ’60s and ’70s—to a greater degree than in any other nation that experienced a New Left—because the institutions of the revolutionary left, like the Communist Party, were demolished during the early Cold War period. The United States, unlike the European welfare states, lacked even a formal labor party. But liberalism did not exhaust the range of possibilities on the left even in the US; it represented its centermost pole. The problem was not that Nader and his contemporaries accidentally ventured too far left for their own good, but that their faction of liberalism eventually monopolized the supply of resources and attention on the left. The political soil of the United States was fatally inhospitable to the growth of any leftist competitors less tethered to the ideological world of midcentury liberalism.

In their attempt to break with an imagined postwar consensus, Nader and his allies doubled down on a particular strand of already existing liberalism that had fallen on hard times during the 1940s and ’50s but had by no means disappeared. This was the style of New Deal liberalism embodied by the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—the strand of the New Deal that took up the antimonopoly tradition in American political thought. Brandeisian liberalism shared what Sabin aptly calls Nader’s “small-business mentality” and his “suspicion of centralized big government and big business.” Power ought to be dispersed as much as possible. Government was a powerful tool for the public good, but only if it was accountable to the people. Markets and private property were not ills in themselves, but vigilance was necessary to prevent their corruption by corporate power and greed. This was the impulse that animated New Deal initiatives like the Glass–Steagall Act, which Brandeis greatly admired, but it was in tension with the alphabet soup regulatory bureaucracy of the early New Deal, which Brandeis helped to strike down from the bench.

Brandeisian liberalism was largely sidelined in the ’40s and ’50s in favor of a more modernist liberalism that emphasized growth, centralization, and the technical advantages of bigness. Nevertheless, it persisted, laying a foundation on which activists of the ’60s could construct a critique of the more hegemonic liberal style. But it was because they were rooted in Brandeisian liberalism that figures like Nader had an easy time finding a rapprochement with the deregulators and inflation hawks—that is to say, slipping over time into a new (neo!) liberalism. Nader’s self-conception as an enlightened, professionalized, individualistic reformer, for instance, was thoroughly continuous with the middle-class reformist culture of Brandeisian progressivism. As the historian Amy C. Offner has recently observed, the phrase social entrepreneur , the template for Nader’s concept of the citizen entrepreneur, was coined by the Tennessee Valley Authority executive David Lilienthal (who in Sabin’s telling represented the polar opposite of Nader’s worldview).

Similarly, Nader’s fixation on the supposedly forgotten American consumer (and his preference for the language of the public) was in some ways just a riff on a central theme of midcentury liberalism. Postwar American society was a veritable consumer’s republic, as the historian Lizabeth Cohen has argued. Promising to fight for consumers was how postwar politicians positioned themselves as transcending the menacingly European capital-versus-labor political dynamic that briefly erupted in the US during the Great Depression. While Nader, unlike most influential postwar liberals, insisted that regulatory policy, not Keynesian growth-boosting, was the best avenue to promote consumer welfare, the animating logic of his consumerist political commitments was hardly as novel as he might have believed, or hoped.

The liberal tradition also tethered the so-called counterculture of the ’60s to early-20th-century middle-class Progressivism. The idea that cultural uplift rather than political revolution was the path to true social change—as expressed in Charles A. Reich’s schematic of levels of consciousness in The Greening of America , or in some of John Lennon’s late Beatles anthems—would hardly have been out of place in the pages of a liberal magazine like the Nation around the turn of the 20th century. Even the psychedelic idiom in which this theme was so often articulated by the counterculture had squarer antecedents: in the late 1950s, prominent apostles of psychedelics included the JPMorgan vice president R. Gordon Wasson and the Republican congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce. Liberal genealogy also reared its head in the counterculture’s frequent professions to have transcended the binary of left and right. When the Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand extolled Ayn Rand’s novels and the treatises of the conservative Catholic technology theorist Marshall McLuhan, it was not because he was an ideologically sloppy leftist, but because he was simply not a leftist—and never thought of himself that way. Like the Progressives, many counterculturalists instead embraced a middle-class concept of reform that rejected oligarchic authority and proletarian revolution alike.

The extent to which the iconic movements of the ’60s United States fed on existing liberalism and fed into neoliberalism is, however, all the more reason not to isolate the New Left as a singular cataclysm that destabilized the New Deal order. Far from a gently humming machine that could have kept operating indefinitely were it not for the intervention of a new generation of radicals, the United States’ simulacrum of social democracy was a fragile assemblage of competing intellectual tendencies and political coalition partners that was always threatening to fall apart.

Nor is there reason to overlook—much less condemn—those intellectuals, activists, and organizations that did manage to formulate a political outlook in the ’60s that was genuinely New and Left, as those critics of the New Left who dismiss the whole movement as proto-neoliberalism would have us do. Ralph Nader, John Lennon, and some of the key players in the early Students for a Democratic Society may have been liberals, but the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Black Panther Party were not. Nor were the SDS members who split into two factions at the organization’s widely mocked 1969 convention, one chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!” and the other chanting “Mao, Mao, Mao Zedong!” These revolutionary New Leftists obviously had their own limitations and, needless to say, did not accomplish their goals. But that is a far cry from triggering neoliberalism, or failing to deserve our interest and sympathy today. A glance at the list of names on the cover of SDS’s 1969 New Left Reader , despite its fair share of incoherence and a characteristic exclusion of women, suggests the contours of a road not taken: Fidel Castro, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Rudi Dutschke, Frantz Fanon, Leszek Kolakowski, Huey P. Newton, Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, Malcolm X. That influential ’60s activists like Nader skirted this road in favor of a homegrown liberalism was their mistake. It doesn’t have to be ours.

If this vision of the left looks New standing next to midcentury liberalism, it is less clearly novel in juxtaposition with the Old Communist and revolutionary socialist left of the early 20th century. Castro and Lenin, Newton and Du Bois, Marcuse and Lukács: these names don’t signify opposite polarities but rather different moments in the same tradition, separated by time and defeat but connected by a broad set of shared commitments. This intuition is at the core of the historian and critical theorist Terence Renaud’s insightful, timely book New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition . The book’s title hints at its core argument, which Renaud develops in the context of Western Europe and Germany in particular. The Old Left of the 1960s, he shows, was once a New Left in its own right in the 1920s and ’30s. When this Old-New Left eventually made its peace with the bourgeois state and with bureaucratic organizational forms, it was not an expression of some innate pragmatic wisdom that was forgotten by subsequent radicals, but a gesture of frustration and even fear. Fear that the revolutionary promise of an earlier moment was slipping away; fear of fascism and the continuation of political repression by ostensibly democratic postwar regimes; fear of the apparent complacency (or worse) of the working class; fear that new ways of living and relating and making art and culture were doomed to dissolve in the absence of steady economic growth.

In Europe at the dawn of the 20th century, there was no consensus about what socialism would or should look like. Marx himself had been notoriously vague on the subject. Like many of his contemporaries, Marx instead focused his political energies on arguing with his fellow leftists—principally Mikhail Bakunin and other anarchists—about what form revolution should take, since it seemed that in any event a revolution would be necessary to end capitalism, and that was a tough enough nut to crack for the time being. Should the revolution seize state power, smash the state and then build a new one, or abolish the state altogether? Would hard-core activists have to wait for a revolutionary spirit to seize the working masses more or less spontaneously, or could they spark a revolution deliberately, and if so, how? These questions generated extensive debate, much of it of enduring interest, but they receded into the background when a strange thing began to happen in Germany in the late 19th century: the Social Democratic Party (SPD) started to win parliamentary elections.

This turn of events kicked off an embrace of electoral politics on the left that has never gone away. But if left electoralism was born out of a certain sort of optimism, from another perspective it represented the consolidation of the most pessimistic possible answer to the question of revolution, and the abandonment of the animating hope of Marx and his generation of leftists. It was, despite its victories, a bit of a bummer, which is why a small group of German leftists were swift to reembrace the revolutionary project after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and the collapse of the German monarchy after World War I. But that moment of possibility dissipated as well. Communist revolutionaries were thwarted or murdered and a bourgeois republic was created at Weimar, with the SPD a faithful participant in its parliamentary operations. Before long, the great model of revolution in Russia had degenerated into an internal tyranny that, to add insult to injury, instructed its loyalists abroad to run for office in parliamentary elections as Communist Party members. By the 1930s, prospects for revolution looked more promising on the fascist right than on the left.

This was the impetus for the creation of the German activist group New Beginning, which Renaud takes as emblematic of interwar “neoleftism”—the New Left before the New Left. In some ways New Beginning (initially just called the Org) was an extension of the Leninist model of revolution, acting as a tightly disciplined vanguard of professional revolutionaries who would attempt to rekindle the embers of revolution among the working class and the parties of the parliamentary left (the SPD and the Communist Party). But New Beginning went beyond Leninism in its insistence on revolutionizing the lives of its members as well as the broader society. Fascism drew its strength from an authoritarian culture that extended far beyond the Nazi party: a culture of patriarchal gender relations, sexual repression, racism, imperialism, anti-intellectualism, and conformism. Part of the revolutionary task of the leftist organization, then, would be to prove that a different way of living was possible. Like certain revolutionary collectives since the Fourierists of the 19th century, members of New Beginning believed that they needed to embody or “prefigure” the society they wanted to create in the way that they related to one another.

Initial results were mixed. New Beginning, and the broader milieu of radical antifascism, was indeed a hotbed of cultural experimentation that had a transformative effect on the personal lives of many of the individuals involved. But it also developed a tightly hierarchical structure that was at odds with its antiauthoritarian ideology, and despite its rhetoric of gender and sexual nonconformism, men outnumbered women by approximately four to one. Its best efforts were powerless against the fascist onslaught, and Hitler’s seizure of power forced many New Beginning members and leaders into exile.

With a characteristically indefatigable spirit, New Beginning members tried to make the most of their exile, linking up with other neoleftists in their new countries of residence and attempting to coordinate resistance activity with comrades who remained in Germany, at tremendous personal risk. A particularly powerful section of New Lefts highlights the interest of the New Beginning exiles in the 20th century’s most iconic experiment with libertarian socialism, in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War. These Spanish neoleftists succeeded to a greater extent than New Beginning in overturning conventional gender relations and instilling a genuinely egalitarian culture within their ranks. It was not without reason that George Orwell believed that the Spanish leftist militias gave him a “foretaste of Socialism.”

But eventually fascism triumphed in Spain as well. When New Beginning members reentered aboveground German politics after the war, it was often with a new spirit of pessimism, if not quite despair. Renaud demonstrates that New Beginning alums like Richard Löwenthal accepted and even encouraged the SPD’s final, official break from Marxism in the 1950s. They concluded that welfare-state democratic socialism was the best they were likely to ever witness, and argued that the experience of fascism taught them it was worth it to strengthen the institutions of political democracy even if it meant abandoning the fight for economic democracy, at least temporarily. In a move that paralleled the midcentury American liberalism that produced Ralph Nader, the ex-radicals “rewrote the history of capitalism so that the protagonist was no longer workers, but citizen consumers,” Renaud writes. This was what Löwenthal called in 1954 a “Socialism without Utopia.”

The eruption of a New Left in the 1960s, then, was not a rejection of the accomplishments of the Old Left but an attempt to recapture the utopian impulse that many of the Old Left’s denizens had harbored in their youth, before a sustained period of world-historical catastrophe drove it out of them. Not for nothing was the philosopher Ernst Bloch’s tome on The Principle of Hope a key text for German New Left radicals. The New Left was new not only because it came after the Old, but because it was anchored in a hopeful belief in the possibility of radical newness. The famous New Left dictum that the personal is political was not meant to hold up the realm of lifestyle as an alternative to a more all-encompassing vision of revolution, as Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora would have it, but rather to hark back to an earlier moment of possibility when it was believed that there was nothing that revolution would leave untouched. Not gender relations, not ways of making collective decisions, not art or thought—because if any of these realms harbored the authoritarian virus, it was a matter of time before it would replicate and spread and attack whatever had been accomplished in the purely political or economic realm. Society faced a choice not between different ways of managing the economy or appointing leaders, but between different total modes of existence. As the slogan echoed out, linking Rosa Luxemburg to May ’68 across time and space: “Socialism or barbarism!”

The choice, apparently, was barbarism. In explaining the failure of the ’60s New Left, Renaud leans on his concept of the neoleftist dilemma: the fact that it is difficult to “sustain the dynamism of a grassroots social movement without succumbing to hierarchy, centralized leadership, and banal political routine.” Neoleftist dilemma is a valuable addition to the lexicon, naming a challenge that anyone who has been involved in a leftist organization during a period of rapid growth will recognize all too well. But the neoleftists of the 1960s in Western Europe and the United States were not only victims of their own success but victims of state and corporate violence. In the US, the flowering of what Grégoire Chamayou has called “authoritarian liberalism” ran the gamut from FBI infiltration and assassination to rampant state-tolerated union busting in workplaces seized by rank-and-file militancy. In West Germany, state surveillance and persecution of leftist activists was so egregious that the historian and former Free University of West Berlin vice president Uwe Wesel declared in 1974 that such an “extensive practice of political regimentation” had “not been equaled since the time of National Socialism.” While de Gaulle defused the momentum of May ’68 in part by exploiting the radicals’ failure to make inroads in the upper echelons of the labor bureaucracy, the coup de grâce was ultimately delivered by the police, in the Sorbonne and in the factories. Perhaps a movement that had navigated the neoleftist dilemma more skillfully—and had overcome severe deficits in numerical strength and organizational aptitude—could have surmounted the onslaught. But it is worth dwelling on this spate of repression nevertheless. If nothing else, it is good to remember that J. Edgar Hoover and Charles de Gaulle certainly did not regard the New Left as tame neoliberals-in-waiting.

It is true that capitalism has never met a utopia it couldn’t market. There is no reason to deny that the utopian horizon of the ’60s New Left turned, at various moments, into grist for the ideology mill. Radicals critiqued the tyranny of the work ethic; scam artists gave us one weird trick to get a four-hour workweek. Radicals excoriated bureaucracy; consultants concocted scheme upon scheme to flatten corporate hierarchy, streamline operations, and enhance flexibility in the workplace. Radicals envisioned a world without patriarchy and white supremacy; Sheryl Sandberg and Robin DiAngelo gave us Lean In and White Fragility . Radicals called for participatory democracy; we got Ask Me Anythings with the boss. Radicals called on people to defy the establishment; clever ad agencies presented us with jeans and sodas that could help us do just that.

But if we’re going to give up on the vision of utopian radicals because it was leeched by advertisers, we might as well give up on having sex or laughing with friends while we’re at it. We don’t need to constrict our vision of what’s possible, hoping, like our distorted memory of the Old Left, to reap some hypothesized political or economic payoff in the bargain. What we need more than ever is to remember just how much our vision has already been constricted. The point is not to reclaim the bureaucratic, but to insist that there are better alternatives to bureaucracy than the cheap thrills of entrepreneurialism; not to play footsie with regressive ideologies on race and gender, but to state forcefully that corporate diversity trainings are not all that feminism and antiracism could mean in our time; not to reject hopes for less work and more meaningful work, but to recognize that those aspirations cannot be actualized through success-hacking or working a hundred hours per week for a nonprofit boss.

What we need, in short, is a practice of negation and imagination that, if you squint, looks a lot like the sort of intellectualism that terrified Joseph Schumpeter. It doesn’t look anything like credentials or educational attainment or academic employment, but intellectualism rarely meant those things before the Cold War. In seeking to build a working-class movement for social transformation, we don’t need to repudiate the alleged intellectual excesses of the New Left, but to recultivate a tradition of working-class intellectualism that thrived when the Old Left parents of the radicals of the ’60s were themselves a New Left. To beat back the suspicion that leftism is an abstract scheme that could never work in our fallen world, we need to show that the revolution it names can be glimpsed already in the lives of ordinary people who are determined to live together extraordinarily.

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The New Deal order was simply too fragile for its winners to prioritize solidarity with less-protected workers.

The People, It Depends

The reality is that self-immolation registers the near-total impotence of protest.

Burnt Offerings

It Is Happening Again

Time Essay: An Elegy for the New Left

Nothing can last in America more than ten years.

—Philip Rahv

In 1967, the New Left was just starting to harvest its biggest crops of the newly radicalized. Draft cards and American flags went up in smoke. The Spring Mobilization to End the War in Viet Nam brought together hundreds of thousands of protesters in San Francisco and New York. Dow Chemical’s recruiters were driven off campus. Ahead for the movement lay Woodstock, Chicago, Kent State, the Days of Rage …

Now, ten years later, the children’s revolution of the ’60s comes straggling back, startling to recognize in the summer of 1977. As if they had been flash-frozen in 1970, demonstrators at Kent State have been trying to prevent construction of a gym near the spot where four students died. Sometimes the ’60s reappear as a waxworks item of nostalgia: four young men each night take the stage of Manhattan’s Winter Garden to impersonate the Beatles of long ago. Or else a splendid fable of arrogance brought low: those who warned “Never trust anyone over 30” are now losing their hair. The wife of Troubadour Bob Dylan (“something is happening here but you don’t know what it is do you Mister Jones?”) divorced him because she said that, among other things, he was a wife beater. Ex-Yippie Jerry Rubin, 39 now, lives in a sleek Manhattan highrise, complete with uniformed doorman. “We are not into sacrifice, martyrdom,” he has written. Rubin and his roommate, Mimi Leonard, plan to get married in December. The most startling news is about Rennie Davis, who helped organize the Chicago Seven’s convention mischief in 1968 and later blissed out on the Perfect Master Maharaj Ji. Davis, it turns out, now sells life insurance for John Hancock in Denver, wearing contact lenses and what looks like a blow-dry hairdo. He is living, he says, a sweet, useful life: Brighten the Corner Where You Are.

It all proves once again that passions and issues are ephemeral and that, as the late Philip Rahv, an editor and longtime student of the American left, knew, radical movements in the U.S. are cyclical. Once, the generation of the New Left and counterculture believed that its youth, like the war in Viet Nam, would go on forever. It is tempting today to throw cherry bombs into the ruins of that delusion: the period seems prime for revisionism and ridicule. But to see that generation contemptuously as merely the screaming, Spock-coddled army of Consciousness III ignores the great changes it helped to cause in American life. Says Tom Hayden, one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society, who last year ran against John Tunney in the California senatorial race: “We ended a war, toppled two Presidents, desegregated the South, broke other barriers of discrimination.” That is hyperbolic; such changes did not occur until a broader nonradical public became disillusioned. But the energies of the young during the “60s made Americans begin to think about their environment, about the poor, about the purposes of progress. One of the most enduring products of the decade could be women’s liberation. Because of the ’60s, the ’70s are quite different from the ’50s—despite some similarities of quiet and self-absorption.

The problem—and the charm—was that nobody in the ’60s planned anything. And so Hayden is left to wonder ruefully: “How could we accomplish so much and have so little at the end?” Part of the answer lies in an epigram of the social theorist Ernest Becker: “A protest without a program is little more than sentimentalism—this is the epitaph of many of the great idealisms.” The first generation raised by the pale blue light of the tube grew up on the sweet simplicities of Leave It to Beaver; it had an outrageous inclination to think that all of life’s injustices could be straightened out in time for the station break.

The young of the ’60s were raised to believe that America was a splendidly virtuous country. When they found —through the Bay of Pigs, Selma, the assassinations, Viet Nam—that it was something more ambiguous, they rose up in a horror that now seems touching in its spontaneity. They joined in immense numbers—the baby boom’s demographic bulge—and without philosophy or program. That was the strength and ultimate weakness of the movement: it arose out of moral outrage and indignation, and grew larger precisely because it was so formless. When the production ran out of moral energy, it collapsed like a small dying star.

Repression did its part, of course; the Black Panthers had much of their leadership wiped out by the police. But there were other reasons. The war ended. Time passed. Metabolisms changed. Manson and Altamont—a California rock festival where a young man was knifed to death—took the innocence out of being a freak. In a post-mortem on the “tired radicals” of the First World War era, Author Walter Weyl wrote, “Adolescence is the true day of revolt, the day when obscure forces, as mysterious as growth, push us, trembling out of our narrow lives, into the wide throbbing life beyond self.”

The New Left operated in a cavalier—and ultimately fatal —ignorance of the past. It should have known, should have remembered, that the American left has always been its own worst enemy, that, as Historian Christopher Lasch wrote, “the history of American radicalism … is largely a history of failure. Radicalism in the United States has no great triumphs to record.” Lasch may be too disconsolate. Nonetheless, the radical movement of the World War I era broke up in factionalism and failure after the Bolshevik revolution. The so-called Old Left that grew up in the ’30s was split into bitter opposing tribes by Stalinism and then McCarthyism. The New Left, though less doctrinaire, also disintegrated into factions, especially after losing the unifying issue of Viet Nam.

The kids who made up the New Left and counterculture are men and women now. They did not merely step onto the centrifuge of the ’60s and pinwheel themselves out in the direction of Aquarius, to vanish forever. Many simply settled down. Says David Dellinger, 62, an elder statesman of the movement: “A lot of people had been leading emergency lives fbr—a-long time. They had put off schooling, babies, their own lives.” Whatever their real accomplishments, the New Leftists and their allies during the ’60s were engaged in an immense, new kind of theater. It was a cultural spectacle; eventually, both players and audience were obliged to go and look after things at home.

As always, the U.S. has demonstrated an infuriating (to radicals) talent for absorbing and accommodating even those who began by wanting to tear the whole place down. Smoking marijuana is practically legal; the draft has been abolished. But the radical impulse is still there. A few weeks ago in Denver, the Third Annual Conference on Alternative State and Local Public Policies attracted some 400 electoral strategists, leftist policy intellectuals, would-be officeholders and labor organizers. The old New Left now expresses itself in a number of local forms. A man named David Olsen founded the San Francisco-based New School for Democratic Management, where workers are taught how to run their own businesses. People from the movement have revived interest in such unglamorous electoral jobs as county assessor, state treasurer and tax commissioner. Sam Brown, an antiwar leader who became state treasurer of Colorado, is now the director of ACTION, the federal agency encompassing VISTA and the Peace Corps.

A number of American corporations are feeling the presence of | executives in their thirties who, having been schooled in ’60s virtues, want more openness and disclosure in business, more debate before making decisions, more flexibility in personal and professional styles. Says Stephen McLin, 30, a vice president for the Bank of America (an outfit some incendiary radicals kept trying to burn down about seven years ago): “The impact of this generation will be felt. But the time isn’t now. It’s coming in about four or five years.”

It may be a delusion to think 1 that the country is finished with what sused to be called Woodstock Nation. Pierre Joseph Proudhon warned about “the fecundity of the unexpected.” The present comparative quiet probably will not last. Issues such as nuclear energy, the arms race (the neutron bomb), the environment, the economy, unemployment and the urban underclass all lie in wait for anyone who approaches the future complacently. It would of course be difficult for history to duplicate the long, wild hallucination of the ’60s. But Rahv’s ten-year rule applies to historical pauses as well as upheavals. The cycle will surely come around again.

"E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left:" A Review

Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas 13:1 (forthcoming, 2016).

A review of the collection of Thompson's "essays and polemics from the 1960s, recently edited and introduced by Cal Winslow and published by Monthly Review Press (2013).

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The New Left: Six Critical Essays on Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Black Power, R. D. Laing

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The New Left: Six Critical Essays on Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Black Power, R. D. Laing Hardcover – January 1, 1971

Print length 208 pages
Language English
Publisher Liberty Press
Publication date January 1, 1971
ISBN-10 9780912050041
ISBN-13 978-0912050041
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ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0912050047
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Liberty Press; First Edition (January 1, 1971)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780912050041
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0912050041
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Best Sellers Rank: #5,579,486 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

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Through the Smoke of Budapest
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Revolution Again! or Shut Your Ears and Run
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'He wants it': Alvarez owning clutch moments as Mets drive toward WC

Anthony DiComo

NEW YORK -- Although Francisco Alvarez had to reach down to hit his seventh-inning double on Saturday, dipping below the strike zone to lift an Orion Kerkering sweeper to left-center field, he caught enough of the pitch to strike it with some authority. As the ball headed toward the gap, Alvarez kept thinking: “No way he’s going to catch it.”

That may not be the type of thought Alvarez would have had a month ago, when he was still deep in a slump that consumed much of his season. But these days, Alvarez has reason for optimism. His hot streak, which included a homer, a double and three RBIs in a 6-3 win over the Phillies, is one of the foremost reasons why the Mets are streaking toward a potential playoff berth.

“He’s almost foaming at the mouth to get up there,” teammate Brandon Nimmo said. “It’s unbelievable. He wants it.”

The Dark Knight returns -- and plans to do so more often

The win allowed the Mets to maintain a two-game lead over the Braves for the final National League Wild Card spot with seven to play. That’s in large part thanks to Alvarez, who has five home runs in his past 11 games after hitting just six in his first 85 contests. He has raised his OPS 50 points in 10 days.

Saturday, Alvarez tied the game in the second inning with a 113.8 mph homer, the hardest of his career (surpassing the 111.7 mph home run he hit two days prior). But his more significant impact may have occurred in the seventh, when he came to the plate moments after Nimmo gave the Mets a late lead with a go-ahead RBI single.

With two men on base and two outs, Alvarez lifted his double into the gap to score two crucial insurance runs. Upon reaching second base, he raised both hands in the air and pointed to the dugout, where Francisco Lindor and others were screaming back at him.

Complete coverage: Mets' clinch scenarios, tiebreakers, key games and more

“Unbelievable,” manager Carlos Mendoza said of the reaction from a sold-out crowd of 44,152, the fifth largest for a regular-season game in Citi Field history. “That’s what it should look, it should feel like -- especially when we’re playing meaningful games in September late in the season, fighting for a playoff spot. It’s what you signed up for. It’s what you dream, you prepare for.”

Have the latest news, ticket information, and more from the Mets and MLB delivered right to your inbox.

It wasn’t just Alvarez who elicited those cheers. Starting pitcher Sean Manaea earned his share with seven-plus effective innings, tipping his cap to the crowd as he departed in the eighth. Nimmo had his go-ahead hit, Luisangel Acuña homered for the third time in his first eight career games and Edwin Díaz was electric in nailing down a four-out save.

But it was Alvarez who changed the entire look of the thing.

When Lindor suffered his back injury last weekend, it generated two pressing questions. One was how long Lindor might be sidelined. The other was who might step up in his absence.

One candidate, J.D. Martinez, is slumping so badly that Mendoza has benched him twice in a week against left-handed starters -- something that would have been unthinkable at virtually any other point of Martinez’s career. Another, Pete Alonso, hasn’t always come through in the highest-leverage spots (despite reaching base in all five of his plate appearances Saturday). Nimmo has been inconsistent. Mark Vientos has cooled from a hot midsummer streak.

That has left Alvarez to take the mantle, which he has done with aplomb. Since the night Lindor injured his back, Alvarez has gone 7-for-24 with four home runs and 10 RBIs.

“Hard-working kid,” Mendoza said. “He’s been working really hard behind the scenes for a month. And finally, it’s paying off. … I don’t think this is an overnight thing. But it’s fun.”

Specifically, Alvarez has worked to improve both his plate discipline and his swing mechanics, trying to open his hips later so that he can “feel powerful” again. He certainly has both the track record and the reputation. After speaking about his own power stroke as a rookie, Acuña laughed when asked about Alvarez. “Now he’s got power,” the younger player replied with a laugh.

For the Mets, that muscle is showing up in games at the most opportune times. Nimmo described the way Alvarez stalks around the batter’s box as proof that he relishes the big moments, which are happening more and more for a Mets club that continues to look the part of a playoff team.

“I like it,” Alvarez said. “I like to play every day. I like those games. And I love the race, too.”

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COMMENTS

What New Left History Gave Us
Compare an exemplary essay of New Left historiography by Stanford's Barton Bernstein published in 1967 about the New Deal with recent liberal historical works on the subject by Eric Rauchway and Ira Katznelson. Bernstein's essay, "The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform," is all but contemptuous of Roosevelt and ...
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays (Studies in
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism.. The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in the West and causing alarming spikes in antisemitic incitement and incidents.
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism The Fathom Essays
by Routledge. Description. Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism. The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in ...
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism
ABSTRACT. Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism. The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in the West and ...
Fathom Collection Published by Routledge Press
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism.. The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in the West and causing alarming spikes in antisemitic incitement and incidents.
The Making of the New Left
The New Left was born in the early nineteen-sixties as a revolt against the modern university, and it died less than ten years later, in the auto-da-fé of Vietnam. Although it helped mobilize ...
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism (Studies in Contemporary Antisemitism
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism.. The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in the West and causing alarming spikes in antisemitic incitement and incidents.
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism : The Fathom Essays
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism.The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in the West and causing alarming spikes in antisemitic incitement and incidents.
New Left
The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, ... The New Left: A Collection of Essays (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969).
The New Left: A Collection of Essays (Extending Horizons Books
Contents: Introduction: Towards a history of the New Left by Staughton Lynd. Part I. NEW LEFT THEORY - Letter to the New Left by C. Wright Mills; Consumption : domestic Imperialism by Dave Gilbert; Anarcho-syndicalism by Rudolf Rocker; Marxism and the New Left by Howard Zinn; Nonviolence and radical social change by Barbara Deming; No rights, no duties by Truman Nelson.
E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics
—Sheila Rowbotham, author, Dreamers of a New Day. Thompson led a cometary life as teacher, protester, and socialist historian. Cal Winslow's invaluable anthology—a gift to the new generation—includes the legendary essays that were so seminal to the emergence of the English New Left in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The new left : a collection of essays : Free Download, Borrow, and
The new left : a collection of essays. Publication date 1969 Topics Radicalism -- United States, Radicalism, Social conditions, New Left -- United States, United States -- Social conditions -- 1960-1980, United States Publisher Boston, P. Sargent Collection internetarchivebooks; inlibrary; printdisabled
New Left Review
Herbert Marcuse used to be the intellectual mascot for the unintended consequences of the New Left. Today it's Michel Foucault. His chief prosecutor is the Belgian sociologist Daniel Zamora, whose first volley came in a volume coedited with Michael Behrent, published in English in 2016 as Foucault and Neoliberalism.The campaign has since continued in a variety of periodicals and culminated ...
Time Essay: An Elegy for the New Left
Nothing can last in America more than ten years. —Philip Rahv In 1967, the New Left was just starting to harvest its biggest crops of the newly radicalized. Draft cards and American flags went...
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism : The Fathom Essays
Routledge, 2024 - Antisemitism. "Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism. The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state, and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel is now roiling progressive politics ...
E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and ...
Download. XML. E. P. Thompson is a towering figure in the field of labor history, best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class...
"E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left:" A Review
Download Free PDF. View PDF. E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics Edited by Cal Winslow New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014 333 pp., $89.00 (cloth); $23.00 (paper) Before E. P. Thompson was an historian or a peace activist, he was a Communist; and he remained some sort of communist all his life.
The New Left; six critical essays : Cranston, Maurice William, 1920
The New Left; six critical essays by Cranston, Maurice William, 1920-Publication date 1971 Topics New Left Publisher New York, Library Press Collection internetarchivebooks; inlibrary; printdisabled ... New York Donor bwb External-identifier urn:oclc:record:1036780191 urn:lcp:newleftsixcritic00cran:lcpdf:7ca5443f-c5d6-496e-92ab-e472052951bf ...
The New Left: Six Critical Essays on Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre
The New Left: Six Critical Essays on Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Black Power, R. D. Laing [Cranston , Maurice (edited by)] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The New Left: Six Critical Essays on Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Black Power, R. D. Laing
The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution is a 1971 collection of essays by the philosopher Ayn Rand, in which the author argues that religion, the New Left, and similar forces are irrational and harmful.Most of the essays originally appeared in The Objectivist.A revised edition appeared in 1975, and an expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz was published in 1999 under the title Return ...
E.P. Thompson and the making of the new left : essays and polemics
E. P. Thompson is a towering fi gure in the fi eld of labor history, best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class. But as this collection shows, Thompson was much more than a historian: he was a dedicated educator of workers, a brilliant polemicist, a skilled political theorist, and a tireless ...
New Left Essays
New Left Essays. Conformity In The 1950s 939 Words | 4 Pages. The expansions of bedroom-communities also materialized to accommodate the large volume of new Americans that was being produced. After the World War II numerous individuals purchased land on the outskirts of urban-cities and use the advancement of technology to create inexpensive ...
Francisco Alvarez drives in 3 runs as Mets beat Phillies
NEW YORK -- Although Francisco Alvarez had to reach down to hit his seventh-inning double on Saturday, dipping below the strike zone to lift an Orion Kerkering sweeper to left-center field, he caught enough of the pitch to strike it with some authority. As the ball headed toward the gap, Alvarez kept thinking: "No way he's going to catch it."

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The New Left: Six Critical Essays on Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Black Power, R. D. Laing Hardcover – January 1, 1971

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