Share This Page
Intellectuals in Action
The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945–1970
320 pages | 6 x 9 | 2002
ISBN 978-0-271-02148-5 | cloth: $69.00 sh
ISBN 978-0-271-02206-2 | paper: $32.95 tr
Buy the Kindle Edition for $4.79
"Kevin Mattson's book will be welcomed by historians for the complications it introduces into our understanding of an important period of dissent and reform and by those who continue to struggle for a more democratic America for its unsentimental account of their inheritance."-Robert Westbrook, University of Rochester
"By recovering the political ideas and commitments of this important group of left intellectuals working as intellectuals, he invites contemporary intellectuals into a workshop of political change. At a moment when liberalism again seems exhausted, it is a timely and important book."-Thomas Bender, New York University
"A novel and revealing view of the early New Left as democratic intellectuals in search of a public."-Leon Fink, University of Illinois at Chicago
"Kevin Mattson's new book is a superb and inspiring account of the sixties as a moment of public intellectual engagement. Mattson interprets New Left debates as continuous with earlier debates about the meaning of American democracy and the possibilities of a radical liberalism. His book is more than a history. For it seeks to remind us of the strengths and limits of New Left discourse so as to inform our own democratic engagements in the present."-Jeffrey C. Isaac, Indiana University
Born in 1966, a generation removed from the counterculture, Kevin Mattson came of political age in the conservative Reagan era. In an effort to understand contemporary political ambivalence and the plight of radicalism today, Mattson looks back to the ideas that informed the protests, social movements, and activism of the 1960s.
To accomplish its historical reconstruction, the book combines traditional intellectual biography—including thorough archival research—with social history to examine a group of intellectuals whose thinking was crucial in the formulation of New Left political theory. These include C. Wright Mills, the popular radical sociologist; Paul Goodman, a practicing Gestalt therapist and anarcho-pacifist; William Appleman Williams, the historian and famed critic of "American empire"; Arnold Kaufman, a "radical liberal" who deeply influenced the thinking of the SDS. The book discusses not only their ideas, but also their practices, from writing pamphlets and arranging television debates to forming left-leaning think tanks and organizing teach-ins protesting the Vietnam War. Mattson argues that it is this political engagement balanced with a commitment to truth-telling that is lacking in our own age of postmodern acquiescence.
Challenging the standard interpretation of the New Left as inherently in conflict with liberalism, Mattson depicts their relationship as more complicated, pointing to possibilities for a radical liberalism today. Intellectual and social historians, as well as general readers either fascinated by the 1960s protest movements or actively seeking an alternative to our contemporary political malaise, will embrace Mattson's book and its promise to shed new light on a time period known for both its intriguing conflicts and its enduring consequences.
Kevin Mattson is Associate Professor of American History at Ohio University. His previous book, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (1998), is also available from Penn State Press.