What causes a generation of intellectuals to switch its political allegiances—in particular, to move from the opposition to the mainstream? In U.S. history, it is the experience of the “Old Left” intellectuals, who swung from avowal of socialism or Communism in the 1930s to apology for American liberalism in the 1950s, that raises this question pointedly. In this highly original and broadsweeping study, Howard Brick focuses on the career of Daniel Bell as an illustrative case of political transformation, combining intellectual history, biography, and the history of sociology to explain Bell’s emerging thought in terms of the tensions between socialists and sociological theory. The resulting work will be of compelling interest to Marxists and American intellectual historians, to sociologists, and to all students of twentieth-century American thought and culture. Daniel Bell’s route to political reconciliation was a tortuous one. While it is common wisdom to cite World War II as the force that welded national unity and brought Depression-era radicals to an appreciation of democratic institutions, the war actually turned the young Bell to the left. Opposing the centralized power of American business and military elites at war’s end, Bell shared the “new radicalism” that infused Dwight MacDonald’s Politics Magazine and motivated C. Wright Mills’ early work. Nonetheless, by the early 1950s, Bell had declared the demise of American socialism and endorsed the welfare reforms of the Fair Deal. Brick’s study finds, however, that the “new radicalism” of the mid-1940s helped to shape Bell’s mature perspective, giving it a richness and critical edge often unrecognized. Brick finds that the heritage of modernism, as manifested in social theory, knit together the process of political transformation, combining disdain for the false promises of liberal progress, estrangement from society at large, and reconciliation with a reality perceived to be full of unconquerable tensions. Brick locates the foundations of Bell’s mature social theory in the historical context of his early work—particularly in the political concessions made by the social-democratic movement, in the face of the Cold War, to the reconstruction of capitalist order in the West. The crucial turning point, in World politics as in Bell’s thinking, can be located in the years 1947–49. After that point, the different strands of Bell’s thinking came together to represent the contradictions in the perspective of a social democrat trapped by the “iron cage” of capitalism, who saw in his political accommodation both the road to progress and the rupture of his hopes. This peculiar paradigm, shaped by the experiences of deradicalization, lies at the heart of Daniel Bell’s social theory, Brick finds. At the present critical point in American history, as a new generation of leftist intellectuals undergoes a process similar to that of Bell’s generation, Brick’s work will be especially important in understanding the historical phenomenon of deradicalization.

Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s (History of American Thought and Culture)

History

Brick, Howard

Americas

University of Wisconsin Press

Radicals in America is a masterful history of controversial dissenters who pursued greater equality, freedom and democracy - and transformed the nation. Written with clarity and verve, Radicals in America shows how radical leftists, while often marginal or ostracized, could assume a catalytic role as effective organizers in mass movements, fostering the imagination of alternative futures. Beginning with the Second World War, Radicals in America extends all the way down to the present, making it the first comprehensive history of radicalism to reach beyond the sixties. From the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, its coverage extends to the Battle of Seattle and Occupy Wall Street. Each chapter begins with a particular life story, including a Harlem woman deported in the McCarthy era, a gay Japanese-American opponent of the Vietnam War, and a Native American environmentalist, vignettes that bring to life the personal within the political.

Radicals in America (Cambridge Essential Histories)

Phelps, Christopher

Cambridge University Press

In Transcending Capitalism, Howard Brick explains why many influential midcentury American social theorists came to believe it was no longer meaningful to describe modern Western society as "capitalist," but instead preferred alternative terms such as "postcapitalist," "postindustrial," or "technological." Considering the discussion today of capitalism and its global triumph, it is important to understand why a prior generation of social theorists imagined the future of advanced societies not in a fixed capitalist form but in some course of development leading beyond capitalism.
Brick locates this postcapitalist vision within a long history of social theory and ideology. He challenges the common view that American thought and culture utterly succumbed in the 1940s to a conservative cold war consensus that put aside the reform ideology and social theory of the early twentieth century. Rather, expectations of the shift to a new social economy persisted and cannot be disregarded as one of the elements contributing to the revival of dissenting thought and practice in the 1960s.
Rooted in a politics of social liberalism, this vision held influence for roughly a half century, from its interwar origins until the right turn in American political culture during the 1970s and 1980s. In offering a historically based understanding of American postcapitalist thought, Brick also presents some current possibilities for reinvigorating critical social thought that explores transitional developments beyond capitalism.

Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought

Business & Money

Economics

Cornell University Press

In Age of Contradiction, Howard Brick provides a rich context for understanding historical events, cultural tensions, political figures, artistic works, and trends of intellectual life. His lucid and comprehensive book combines the best methods of historical analysis and assessment with fascinating subject matter to create a three-dimensional...

Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s

In Transcending Capitalism, Howard Brick explains why many influential midcentury American social theorists came to believe it was no longer meaningful to describe modern Western society as "capitalist," but instead preferred alternative terms such as "postcapitalist," "postindustrial," or "technological." Considering the discussion today of capitalism and its global triumph, it is important to understand why a prior generation of social theorists imagined the future of advanced societies not in a fixed capitalist form but in some course of development leading beyond capitalism.Brick locates this postcapitalist vision within a long history of social theory and ideology. He challenges the common view that American thought and culture utterly succumbed in the 1940s to a conservative cold war consensus that put aside the reform ideology and social theory of the early twentieth century. Rather, expectations of the shift to a new social economy persisted and cannot be disregarded as one of the elements contributing to the revival of dissenting thought and practice in the 1960s.Rooted in a politics of social liberalism, this vision held influence for roughly a half century, from its interwar origins until the right turn in American political culture during the 1970s and 1980s. In offering a historically based understanding of American postcapitalist thought, Brick also presents some current possibilities for reinvigorating critical social thought that explores transitional developments beyond capitalism.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was just one of several new insurgent movements for democracy and social justice during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it must be understood in the context of other causes and organizations—in the United States and abroad—that inspired its founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. In A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times, a diverse group of more than forty scholars and activists take a transnational approach in order to explore the different—though often interconnected—campaigns that mobilized people along varied racial, ethnic, gender, and regional dimensions from the birth of the New Left in the civil rights and pacifist agitation of the 1950s to the Occupy movements of today. This volume features three never-before-published “manifesto drafts” written by Tom Hayden in early 1962 that generated the discussion leading to the Port Huron meeting. Other highlights include recollections from leading women in the Port Huron deliberations who, three years later, protested the subordination of women within the radical movements, thus setting the stage for the rise of women’s liberation. A New Insurgency is based on the University of Michigan’s conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement in 2012. Blurb “The fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement has drawn a great number of reflections and commemorations, but this carefully conceived volume offers an account of unrivaled ambition, exceptional breadth, and surprising insight. It both excavates the event itself—vividly, perceptively, exhaustively—and gives it the largest and most illuminating of contexts. A New Insurgency is as close to definitive as any volume of this kind can become.” Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan

A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

Education & Teaching

Parker, Gregory

Higher & Continuing Education

Maize Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brick, Howard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Brick, Howard

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brick, Howard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s (History of American Thought and Culture)

Radicals in America (Cambridge Essential Histories)

Radicals in America (Cambridge Essential Histories)

Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought

Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s

Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought

A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times