The Rise and Fall of the American Left

by John Patrick Diggins

{Note: this book is a 'substantially expanded' version of The American Left in the Twentieth Century, published in 1973.}

The American Left was born in America--not, as some would have it, in Europe or the Third World, and 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.

The American Left is not a single phenomenon but four surprising eruptions throughout the past century:

• The Lyrical Left, of the First World War years. Sometimes known as the 'New Intellectuals', its leaders, born and educated in the United States, were uniformly mindful of America's roots.

• The Old Left, as it came to be known, wrote its agenda driven by the legacy of World War I, the hopes that had sprung from the promise of socialism, and the clear failure of American capitalism so manifest in the Great Depression.

• The New Left of the 1960s combined a revolt against the banalities of middleclass life with civil rights fervor and, finally, protest against America's longest war, Vietnam. The result was one of the most unsettled and incoherent decades in American history.

• And now, much embattled by twelve years of Republican rule, we have the contemporary Academic Left building on unfirm ground, seeking on the one hand to question the traditional values of the West and on the other to embrace the causes of women and minorities long shut out of that tradition whose future may well depend upon Western values.

The American Left is no dry-as-dust subject. Its leaders, men and women strong in rhetoric and actions, are among the most riveting personalities of our time--Max and Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman, Walter Lippmann, Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Herbert Marcuse, Mario Savio, Eldridge Cleaver, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe. These lives, so skillfully interwoven into so important an American story, make this book the best available history of its subject.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

John Patrick Diggins was a professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center, the author of more than a dozen books on widely varied subjects in American intellectual history.

Reviews

[Galatea · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engaging history of the American Left, split into 4 separate time periods:
That of the "Lyrical Left" emerging from local trade organizations and Freethinkers from the 1900s till WW1,
the "Old Left" emerging after, during the time the Soviet Union was being Stalinized, with all the different factions that entails,
that of the "New Left" emerging from such cultural watersheds as the Civil Rights movement, and Queer and Women's liberation locally, and also influenced by international events like the wars and revolutions in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the rest of the Third World,
and lastly, the "Academic Left", those who've emerged as radicals within the university after having bombarded and barricaded themselves against it.

This is very much a general history, providing a cursory summary of the entire 20th century and the myriad movements and trends of the time. I'm sure specialists will find things to correct, nitpick, and protest, but it's a strength of the book that the text openly points to its sources and influences, and points those who want to read further to both primary sources and other secondary texts on every topic that's written about.

A fine introduction to the topic, and definitely helpful for anyone studying 20th century politics, especially those involving the Cold War, colonialism and postcolonialism, and American History.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A Left without power is familiar and perhaps a defining characteristic of its historical predicament; a Left without knowledge loses its excuse for being." (16)

"A radical nucleus of a generation is formed when some young intellectuals or students, as a result of common 'destabilizing' experiences, begin to feel, articulate, and defend the identity of certain values and ideals in a society that is indifferent or hostile. ... And the very uniqueness of these experiences explains in part why radicals of different generations see themselves as dissimilar, why they often refuse to listen to one another, why they will not deign to learn from one another." (44)

"With its vague, quasi-anarchist illusions and festive spirit, the Lyrical Left saw itself standing at the dawn of a new era in which intellectuals at last could live without compromising their devotion to truth, beauty, and justice. The difference between the Lyrical Left and the Old Left is the difference between innocence and experience." (154-55)

"The 'God that failed' the Old Left was the cold, thundering prophet of scientific laws and historical doom. ... When Marxism emerged again in American radical thought in the New Left of the sixties, it was not as a crude science of prediction but as a penetrating, humanist critique of the sickness of modern society." (200)

"Was theoretical reflection and writing on the campus more important than political action in the community? (Marx changed the world without leaving the British Museum.)" (229)

"The historical context of the Old Left was the abundance of poverty; that of the New Left, the poverty of abundance." (232)

"The earlier New Left saw the problem of history as the problem of alienation and the meaning of existence; the later Academic Left saw domination and hegemony everywhere and wondered how subjugated humanity had lost its freedom without knowing it. The challenge was to unmask concealed power wherever it could be spotted. The challenge was to spread suspicion." (349)

"With Habermas and Rorty the study of the American Left ends where it began, with American pragmatism as a philosophical call to engage life as a continuous experiment." (370)

[m · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book, inhaled it.

This is the kind of book that alters the way one understands or reads other books. I'll definitely reread this someday, and maybe give it a fifth star.

Download it here:

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20076...

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad but true.

[Michael Paone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this although that enjoyment dipped with the last two chapters, which deal with the Academic Left’s (his words not mine!) turn to Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and French thinkers like Derrida and Foucault. His suggestion of abandoning the black hole that is French post-structuralism for thinkers throughout the American tradition is an interesting one. Very readable prose that is not bogged down in statistics or small details. This book is a great good introduction to an interesting, if not often depressing, subject

[Richard Abdullaev · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it. Very easy to read, which was refreshing. Helps me win arguments about the American Left.

[Henry Reichman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned a lot about history and activism and hermeneutics! However, Marxist theory is a bit much for me I fear. I think I will just vote blue mindlessly forever and let smarter people figure out how post-structuralism fits into class consciousness or whatever.