Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals - Softcover

Saul D. Alinsky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394717368 ISBN 13: 9780394717364

Publisher: Vintage, 1972

Synopsis

First published in 1971, Rules for Radicals is Saul Alinsky's impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.” Written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first to question, this volume exhibits his style at its best. Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

This primers tells the "have-nots" how they can organize to achieve real political power for the practice of true democracy.

About the Author

Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909 and educated first in the streets of that city and then in its university. Graduate work at the University of Chicago in criminology introduced him to the Capone gang, and later to Joliet State Prison, where he studied prison life. 
 
He founded what is known today as the Alinsky ideology and Alinsky concepts of mass organization for power. His work in organizing the poor to fight for their rights as citizens has been internationally recognized. In the late 1930s he organized the Back of the Yards area in Chicago (the neighborhood made famous in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle). Subsequently, through the Industrial Areas Foundation which he began in 1940, Mr. Alinsky and his staff helped to organize communities not only in Chicago but throughout the country. He later turned his attentions to the middle class, creating a training institute for organizers. He died in 1972.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1972
• ISBN 10: 0394717368
• ISBN 13: 9780394717364
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 196