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• Stanje Polovno

The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963 - the intellectual as a social type, Christopher Lasch, 380 stranica
autor knjige Pobuna elita i izdaja demokratije i Narcistička kultura

Američki radikalizam, SAD, USA, intelektualci, anti-intelektualci, Linkoln kolkord,

Around the turn of the century, the American liberal tradition made a major shift away from politics. The new radicals were more interested in the reform of education, culture, and sexual mores. Through vivid biographies, Christopher Lasch chronicles these social reformers from Jane Addams, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Lincoln Steffens to Norman Mailer and Dwight MacDonald

A lot of people who read this book don't quite get what Lasch was aiming at here and thus they think his definitions don't entirely work. After his first book on liberals' response to the Russian revolution, Lasch's next three books are about the development of intellectuals and movements that lead to the contemporary left of the 1960s. This is the first of those books and it focuses on the "new radicals" who were mostly the children of the wealthy in the 19th century and become professional academics and public intellects into the middle of the 20th. While he criticizes the intellectuals for not being interested in politics as such, he does not mean that they did not have political opinions, but that their political opinions often were moral and cultural concerns that didn't directly influence their lives and that in the middle of the 20th century, celebrity radicalism itself eclipsed radical ideas. However, Lasch also attacks pragmatism as developed from Dewey to Sidney Hook, documenting callousness about war, concessions to the state at the expense of expressed ideals, and often incoherence. While the last chapter angered a lot of contemporary liberals--Richard Rorty was famously angered by the last chapter--the entirety of the book documents that US radicals were lost in how to respond to failures of World War 1 and how their tenuous connections to social movements often left them conceding to either the state or the dispair.

This book gives one an incomplete view of the problems of the American left, but as many of these people fade into the background and leftists' historiography in America tends to begin with the new left as the radical split, Lasch illustrates that the tendencies were there since the late 19th century. American parochialism has, ironically, led to American radicals ignoring their own history and leading US leftists to think that the ruptures of the 1960s came from nowhere. However, you have to read Lasch's new two books, The Agony of the American Left and World of Nations to fully grasp why.