The Rise and Fall of the American Left

Looks at the history of the American Left, including its four distinct movements, and describes its leaders and goals

About halfway through his thorough and often engaging look at the American left, Diggins ( Mussolini and Fascism ) refers to his subject as "what never happens twice." This brings to mind lightning, which strikes quickly and never in the same place twice. And so it seems with the history of the American left, which Diggins divides here into four periods, or generations--the Lyrical Left, the Old Left, the New Left and the Academic Left. Each phase was relatively brief, and "there was little historical continuity and even less political sympathy" among the generations. Diggins is admirably comprehensive; he discusses the left as an ally of the working class and assesses the role of blacks, women and artists in the movement. He also points to the "values of the American Enlightenment," liberalism and the pragmatism of John Dewey, as possibly halting "the decline and fall" of the left, a conclusion potentially surprising to some while comforting to others. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A brief cultural history, written by a mainstream liberal, that describes radicalism, home-grown style, over the last hundred years. Expanding his The American Left in the Twentieth Century (1973), Diggins (History/CUNY Graduate Center; The Proud Decades, 1988, etc.) focuses on the resemblances and differences among four movements that have characterized the American left: the ``Lyrical Left,'' centered around Greenwich Village in the WW I era; the ``Old Left'' of the Depression; the ``New Left'' of the Sixties; and the latter's strange afterlife as the ``Academic Left'' of today. Although the first three movements were marked by generational discontinuities from those preceding or following them, each ``erupted in a fury of radical innocence and wounded idealism so peculiar to American intellectual history.'' Ironically, Diggins points out, now that it has succeeded in entrenching itself into the universities it once scorned, the Academic Left has become enamored of such approaches as deconstructionism--leaving it impotent, he believes, in the one area from which it traditionally gained strength: knowledge. As a result, it is left with ``no political significance but considerable educational significance, no power to affect immediate events but considerable authority to shape the minds of the young.'' It is no accident that this discussion lacks the liveliness of Diggins's earlier ones, which rely heavily on seminal histories of American Communism and the New Left written by Theodore Draper, Daniel Aaron, Todd Gitlin, and James Miller. There, on more comfortable ground, Diggins indulges his gift for pungent, pithy description (e.g., Michael Harrington, whose The Other America sparked the War on Poverty, was a ``Catholic with a bad conscience and a good heart''), while sketching vivid profiles of Eugene V. Debs, John Reed, Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, and the philosopher who inspired all four movements, John Dewey. A concise analysis of what has animated the American radical impulse. (B&w illustrations--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this expanded version of Diggins's The American Left in the Twentieth Century (HBJ, 1973), Diggins retains his basic premises: that the American Left was based on native radicalism and only came to Marxism later and that its intellectual history can be discussed in terms of generations--Lyrical, Old, New, and Academic. His interpretation of the first three remains substantially the same, while he describes the Academic Left as being composed of New Left students who became academics in the 1970s and now form the "most significant ideological presence on the American campus." Readers looking for a more comprehensive history should go to The Encyclopedia of the American Left (LJ 6/15/90). Diggins's discussion of the Academic Left makes this more up-to-date than James Weinstein's Ambiguous Legacy (LJ 11/15/75), which ends with the New Left. It also makes it relevant to the contemporary controversy about "political correctness." For all political and intellectual history collections.
- Jonathan Miller, Rochester Inst. of Technology, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.