Looking Left

At a time when the majority of Americans equate ‘liberal’ with ‘left’, it is not surprising that American leftists find it hard to agree what the left really is. So it is remarkable how much these two very dissimilar historians do agree. Both adopt capacious and historically changing definitions. Both see equality, democracy and freedom as core issues of the left; both consider equality the more fundamental cause, yet recognize that the left has achieved more in expanding freedom. Both doubt that transcending capitalism or establishing socialism is currently an achievable goal. They arrive at similar – and sobering – conclusions. First, while seldom, if ever, capable of fully realizing its proximate, let alone ultimate goals, the left has nonetheless been disproportionately responsible for such progress as the US has made toward its putative ideals of freedom, equality and common good. Second, the left has made this contribution, however, primarily when allied with and putting pressure on liberals, and only rarely as an independent movement.

However, Zaretsky and Kazin reach these conclusions from very different routes. Kazin sees an American left composed of diverse progressive campaigns, often in contradiction with each other, while Zaretsky describes the left as a unitary entity that has passed through a number of stages, in a teleological development toward freedom and equality. In the US these definitional differences have been particularly evident and hotly ideological, because there has been so little continuity in organizations that consider themselves leftist. Among activists such disagreements have produced harsh and often self-righteous conflicts. But their contrasting narratives invite the reader to a useful consideration of what is at stake in our understanding of ‘the left’.

Eli Zaretsky is an intellectual and cultural historian, best known for his very influential 1970s essay ‘Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life’ as well as his more recent work on the history of psychoanalysis. He approaches the history of the left from a theoretical standpoint, arguing that three structural crises shaped American historical development. These crises were the conflict over slavery ending in the Civil War; the crisis of industrial capitalism that culminated in the New Deal and the Popular Front of the 1930s; and the postwar political crisis that spawned both the New Left and neo-liberalism. He is determinist about large-scale historical change, arguing that slavery would have been abolished without the abolitionists and the modern administrative state would have been established without socialists, but deftly combines this with crediting left agency in shaping these changes. In each structural crisis the national identity was at stake; the crises are moments when the ‘nation has to look inward and ... not just rely on its everyday, commonsensical fund of assumptions’ to adapt to new circumstances (p. 6). In each crisis energetic left movements strengthened impulses toward freedom and equality that were at the core of America’s national identity.

Michael Kazin is a historian of labour and politics who has written about populism and the New Left and is now co-editor of Dissent magazine. His concept of the left is more capacious than Zaretsky’s (as in his earlier The Populist Persuasion, 1998); here he traces a continuous tradition from pre-Civil War communitarian socialism through nineteenth and twentieth-century populism, labour movements and Socialist and Communist parties and on to the New Left. His book concentrates more on the movements and less on their sources than Zaretsky’s, and the themes that wind through this history primarily concern the varying, and often conflicting, left strategies. One theme is the tension between cultural radicalism, even utopianism, that small groups may engender, and pragmatic coalition-building – a tension which Kazin does not try to resolve but sees as a constant of progressive social movements. Another is the mixed record of the left with regard to racism. Aimed at a general audience, the book will be challenging to left activists as well as instructive to undergraduates. It...