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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (1998)di Doug Rossinow
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In the 1960s a left-wing movement emerged in the United States that not only crusaded against social and economic exploitation, but also confronted the problem of personal alienation in everyday life. These new radicals - young, white, raised in relative affluence - struggled for peace, equality and social justice. Their struggle was cultural as well as political, a search for meaning and authenticity that marked a new phase in the long history of American radicalism. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)306.20973Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Political institutions Political sociology--United StatesClassificazione LCVotoMedia: Nessun voto.Sei tu?Diventa un autore di LibraryThing. |
In his "Introduction: From the Age of Anxiety to the Politics of Authenticity," Rossinow makes an intriguing claim:
To segregate political radicalism from the mainstream of political and cultural history is to obscure the close and tangled connections between the new left and larger strands of political and cultural development in the twentieth-century United States - strands such as social gospel liberalism and Christian evangelicalism, cold war liberalism and Western libertarianism, liberal feminism and the search for authenticity. My investigation of these connections provides an alternative genealogy for the new left. Looking at the new left from the ground up and bringing it into focus as it appeared in and from the provinces, this book provides, in a sense, the first new left history of the new left. (p. 11)
Instead of looking at Berkeley, Columbia or Madison, Rossinow focuses on the evolution of the new left at the University of Texas at Austin. In the first half of the book he covers the new left up to the point where the focus turned to anti-Vietnam protest. Part One Chapters include "This Once Fearless Land: Secular Liberals Under Right-Wing Rule"; "Breakthrough: The Relevance of Christian Existentialism"; "The Issues of Life: The University YMCA-YWCA and Christian Liberalism"; "To Be Radical Now: Civil Rights Protest and Leftward Movement". As the chapter titles suggest he focuses on the role of Christian social movements on the origins of new left during the early years of the Cold War. In a state where right wing "homemade fascists" were all too ready to persecute the left, Christian or not, the YMCA-YWCA movement provided the space in which those dedicated to the social application of liberal Christianity to try out their ideas. As Sara Evans has argued on the origins of women's liberation, women were a key force in the early awakenings of liberal Protestantism's postwar social activism.
Though we know more generally of the connection between the civil rights movement and student radicalism, Rossinow also shows the importance of women to the early student movement. Showing the centrality of Sandra "Casey" Hayden early in the protest movement in Texas helps us historicize the marginalization of women in the national SDS. The feminist critique of the new left hence appears as a re-assertion of earlier involvement rather than a new awakening to rights freshly discovered by women's activism in basically male movements.
The National SDS organization forms one of the foci of the second half of the book. By moving to a 90% focus on Vietnam later in the decade, the student left in the SDS (both locally in Austin and Nationally) tied itself to an issue whose import was transient.
The hard truth is that the new left's entanglement with the war and the anti-war movement helped derail its initial project of developing a movement for fundamental political change, rooted in a thorough critique of American life ... The sense of desperate urgency produced by the war led the left away from long-term strategic thinking, toward displays of anger that got it nowhere. (p. 246)
By focusing so heavily on Vietnam, the student left helped the right in its quest to marginalize the left as a whole as irrelevant to the concerns of modern life. As the new left moved to embrace Marxism and the civil rights movement moved to embrace black power, an increasingly fragmented world was appearing. The move toward this position is documented in Part Two Chapters include "These People Were From America: The New Left Revisited"; "Against Rome: The New Left and the Vietnam War"; "This Whole Screwy Alliance: The New Left and the Counterculture"; "The Revolution is Yet to Come: The Feminist Left" Ending with the consideration of the feminist left, he points the way for the left to reclaim its heritage by embracing the feminist critique of American society. In his "Epilogue: From the Politics of Authenticity to the Politics of Identity," he makes the point that the new left was essentially a reform movement, bound in time by the events of the 60s and 70s. As the new left retreated further and further into local community building it gave up its claims to reshaping America in a more democratic mold, and eventually the new left retreated entirely to allow its members to cultivate their own gardens.
Like all reform movements, the New Left cannot be brought back to life (except perhaps by the historian's craft). This movement is now history, but the quest to reform American life will go on. The problems they wrestled with are still with us.