Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey - Softcover

Horowitz, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684840057 ISBN 13: 9780684840055

Publisher: Touchstone, 1998

Synopsis

Originally a radical socialist, the current driving force behind the rise of the Hollywood right recounts how he moved from one set of political convictions to another over the course of thirty years, and challenges readers to consider how they came by their own convictions.

About this title

Review:

Raised to be a committed Marxist by communist intellectual parents, Horowitz was in on the ground floor of Berkeley activism, and through his work as an editor at Ramparts magazine, he emerged as a key player in the New Left. He went on to become an active supporter of the Black Panthers and something of an intimate of their founder, Huey P. Newton. Yet today he is an outspoken political conservative who has supported many right-wing causes (such as the contras in Nicaragua) and been critical of '60s radicalism in general. It would be easy to conclude that Horowitz went from A to Z this way because he's superficial and unstable. Instead, as this moving, intellectual autobiography shows, his second thoughts about leftism emerged gradually as he experienced various aspects of the "Movement." The catalytic episode came when he discovered that the Panthers had murdered a friend of his, but even then Horowitz was slow to convert, primarily because he was heavily enmeshed in what he now views as the quintessential leftist habit of judging politics by its intentions, not its acts.

Review:

Many intellectuals have made the voyage from Left to Right in recent decades. But few have come from as deep inside the hard Left as Horowitz, and none has retained more of the 60's style. Horowitz, in fact, prides himself on his determination to continue speaking "in the voice of the New Left--outraged, aggressive, morally certain."

It is hard to think of anyone who has turned on his own past with more fury than David Horowitz. Radical Son, his memoir, charts a trek from one political commitment to something approaching its opposite, and the events that propelled him on his way.

How, ultimately, is David Horowitz's transformation to be explained? After all, many 1960's radicals dwelled in the same tawdry cesspool, witnessed the same murders or lesser acts of crime and duplicity, yet continued to cling fervently to the cause.

One explanation may be generational. Horowitz was approaching the seasoned age of thirty when he entered California radicalism in the late 1960's, and was thus slightly older than his fellows. His deviation, then, may be seen as that of a man who had come to place some value on middle-class existence.

A second possibility, one that runs somewhat counter to the first, is that the very depth and intensity of Horowitz's radicalism led inevitably to a spasm of self-correction. The writer Paul Berman once remarked with some asperity that "Horowitz is in the American vein. He doesn't correct; he converts."

A third interpretation might also be adduced. As the gripping pages of Radical Son make clear, Horowitz possesses a fearless capacity for self-examination--hardly a noted virtue of the radical Left. In the end, it is this capacity which may have rescued him from an association with murderers. It certainly enabled him to reinvent himself, and to forge a new career as the kind of person his parents had no doubt warned him against. -- Commentary Magazine, June 1997, Christopher Caldwell

[H]is portrait of the 60s and its legacy is sure to make his book controversial.... With Radical Son, Mr. Horowitz has written a courageous book, full of self-revelation with a willingness to expose his own frailties in the most sensitive areas of sex and family. Still he is nothing if not contentious, and some of his contentions will rub readers the wrong way. -- The New York Times Book Review, Richard Gid Powers

About this edition

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0684840057
• ISBN 13: 9780684840055
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480