The new left was defined principally by the search for a third way for socialism between the statist forms of social democracy and a Stalinism discredited by the invasion of Hungary in 1956. Central to this book is the argument that the intellectual breakthroughs made by a movement that included Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and E. P. Thompson has had a much more important impact on British politics than has been acknowledged hitherto.
To say as much could involve taking sides in one of the central controversies of the British left in the postwar era, but Michael Kenny's appraisal is too subtle to fall into this trap. The controversy centres on the change in the character of the New Left Review made by Perry Anderson after 1962. The journal had been one of the principal achievements of the movement, and had provided a unique forum for debates about strategic intervention in British politics. These included the real sociological shifts that underlay the mistaken contemporary perception of the emergence of "classlessness", the dangers in seeing planning as a replacement for nationalisation, and the battles over meaning being waged through the new mass medium of "the telly".
Kenny is surely right to see the uncertainty of the new left about how to respond to a more pluralist world as a strength rather than a weakness. Socialism lacked the language and traditions to deal with the new kind of society that the 1950s had begun to reveal.
Anderson took the New Left Review towards a greater concern with international developments and with continental Marxist theory, but the view that the first new left was unsophisticated and naively empiricist is shown to be wrong.
Of its major figures Kenny clearly has greatest sympathy with Williams and Hall, and it was in their work that the concern with community, culture and lived experience was most apparent. Thompson was often uneasy with what he saw as the lack of concern with power in such cultural analysis, but Thompson's socialist humanism was still in certain respects shaped by his loyalties to communism and was less able to respond to contemporary politics.
In contrast to critics who have bemoaned the damage done by the eclipse of Thompson's ideas, Kenny is able to show why Thompson was unable to translate his ideas into a popular vernacular and remained trapped within a romantic concern with a lost working-class radicalism.
As well as telling its story in full, Kenny has given us the most perceptive and sensitive analysis of this movement yet. Then, as now, independent leftist intellectuals sought something better than Labour, but were forced eventually to come to terms with their own political weakness and the Labour party's overwhelming institutional dominance.
Brian Doherty is a lecturer in politics, 51国产视频 of Keele.
The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin
Author - Michael Kenny
ISBN - 0 85315 797 9
Publisher - Lawrence and Wishart
Price - ?14.99
Pages - 216
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