The Rise and Fall of the American Left (Paperback, Revised)

A brief cultural history, written by a mainstream liberal, that describes radicalism, home-grown style, over the last hundred years. Expanding his The American Left in the Twentieth Century (1973), Diggins (History/CUNY Graduate Center; The Proud Decades, 1988, etc.) focuses on the resemblances and differences among four movements that have characterized the American left: the "Lyrical Left," centered around Greenwich Village in the WW I era; the "Old Left" of the Depression; the "New Left" of the Sixties; and the latter's strange afterlife as the "Academic Left" of today. Although the first three movements were marked by generational discontinuities from those preceding or following them, each "erupted in a fury of radical innocence and wounded idealism so peculiar to American intellectual history." Ironically, Diggins points out, now that it has succeeded in entrenching itself into the universities it once scorned, the Academic Left has become enamored of such approaches as deconstructionism - leaving it impotent, he believes, in the one area from which it traditionally gained strength: knowledge. As a result, it is left with "no political significance but considerable educational significance, no power to affect immediate events but considerable authority to shape the minds of the young." It is no accident that this discussion lacks the liveliness of Diggins's earlier ones, which rely heavily on seminal histories of American Communism and the New Left written by Theodore Draper, Daniel Aaron, Todd Gitlin, and James Miller. There, on more comfortable ground, Diggins indulges his gift for pungent, pithy description (e.g., Michael Harrington, whose The Other America sparked the War on Poverty, was a "Catholic with a bad conscience and a good heart"), while sketching vivid profiles of Eugene V. Debs, John Reed, Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, and the philosopher who inspired all four movements, John Dewey. A concise analysis of what has animated the American radical impulse. (Kirkus Reviews)

Born in America, the American Left was nurtured by intellectuals and activists who read Jefferson and Whitman before they read Marx or Mao. One lesson this brilliant history teaches us is that the fury of radical innocence and wounded idealism so peculiar to American intellectual history springs from native soil. Nor is the American Left a single phenomenon but four surprising eruptions throughout the past century: The Lyrical Left, of the First World War years; the Old Left, driven by the legacy of World War I, the promise of socialism, and the Great Depression; the New Left of the 1960s, combining a revolt against the banalities of middle-class life with civil rights fervor and protest against the war in Vietnam; and now contemporary Academic Left, seeking both to question the traditional values of the West and to embrace the causes of women and minorities.

General

Imprint:	W W Norton & Co Inc
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	April 1993
First published:	October 1992
Authors:	John Patrick Diggins
Dimensions:	211 x 140 x 30mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	436
Edition:	Revised
ISBN-13:	978-0-393-30917-1
Categories:	Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > History of ideas, intellectual history Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Socialism & left-of-centre democratic ideologies
LSN:	0-393-30917-7
Barcode:	9780393309171

Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate? Let us know about it.

Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? Send us a new image.

Is this product missing categories? Add more categories.

Review This Product

No reviews yet - be the first to create one!