Generations Of Social Movements

This book examines the history of the Left in the United States and France, and how the two countries have differed in terms of leftist militancy. The book also looks at how different activist figures have influenced the Left in the two countries.

French political culture has long been seen as a model of leftist militancy, while the left in the United States is often perceived in terms of organizational discontinuity. Yet, the crisis of social democracy today suggests that at a time when the archetypal European welfare state is in danger, critics and citizens interested in understanding or reviving progressive politics are invited to consider the United States, where modes of creative activism recurrently demonstrate potentialities for a renewed leftist culture. Using a transatlantic perspective, this volume identifies activist influence through the designation or rejection of specific intellectual and militant figures across generations, and it examines various narrative modes used by militants to write their own history. Review: This important work interrogates the history of the Left in vital ways, bringing an abundance of fresh insight into developments that have remained as mysterious to activists as to outsiders. The comparisons and contrasts of the US and French Left, one seemingly collapsed by 1960 and the other still dominated by an Old Left presence, offer new ways of seeing developments since. The crisis of Ferguson, Missouri, prompting protests across a nation but without any seeming coordination or means of continuity, alone suggests how badly this volume is needed. -Paul Buhle, author of Marxism in the United States, coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left This important work interrogates the history of the Left in vital ways, bringing an abundance of fresh insight into developments that have remained as mysterious to activists as to outsiders. The comparisons and contrasts of the US and French Left, one seemingly collapsed by 1960 and the other still dominated by an Old Left presence, offer new ways of seeing developments since. The crisis of Ferguson, Missouri, prompting protests across a nation but without any seeming coordination or means of continuity, alone suggests how badly this volume is needed. -Paul Buhle, author of Marxism in the United States, coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left