Editor's Introduction

It is a cliché that we live in an unusually polarized time, one in which those from one side of a political fence tend to vilify those on the other side. Certainly in the United States, this dynamic is more the case now than it has been for quite some time. But in the current and recent issues of our journal, the articles and reviews have ranged across the political spectra and, even when the authors indicate their own political allegiances, the articles nonetheless have been not about making rhetorical points, but foremost about expanding and deepening our understanding of radical individuals, groups, movements, or themes. JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism has in the hopper many forthcoming articles on the gamut of radicalism across the political spectrum, and our authors consistently provide insights into very diverse and often ideologically opposed radical groups, movements, and individuals. The current issue is no exception.

Our first four articles demonstrate the diversity of the journal's topics by looking at very different forms of contemporary or relatively recent variants of radicalism. In "From Radical Counterculture to Pragmatic Radicalism? The Collective Identity of Contemporary Radical Left-libertarian Activism in Sweden," Jan Jämte, Måns Lundstedt, and Magnus Wennerhag discuss the emergence in Sweden of a phenomenon we've seen elsewhere as well (for instance, in the Revolutionary Communist Party) the confluence of the left with variants of libertarianism. The second article is Evelyn Burg's "Fellow Traveling along the Popular Front: Kenneth Burke's Two Attitudes toward History," about the well-known author's relationship(s) to Stalinism, and the third is Marta Romero-Delgado's "Personal and Political Narratives: Radicalization of Peruvian Women Combatants," discussing how women in the Peruvian Armed Conflict (1980–2000) in the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path) and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement in Peru became radicalized. The fourth of these articles is Chelsea Roberts's "Left of New Left: The Living Theatre's Anarchism," in which she seeks to disentangle the Living Theatre anarchist performance collective from other political groups and movements, particularly of the 1960s and 1970s.

The second set of articles focus on historically much earlier radical topics, the first of these being by Geoffrey Poitras on "The Luddite Trials: Radical Suppression and the Administration of Criminal Justice," which presents a very detailed look at the documents of the period in order to produce a clear picture of how the judicial system worked in the case of the Luddite movement, and more broadly, of how an administrative state apparatus can diminish or extirpate a perceived radical threat. And in the second, Brent Ranalli discusses Thomas Paine's neglected pamphlet Agrarian Justice with an eye to contemporary discussions regarding "Universal Basic Income" and related proposals for wealth-sharing political arrangements.

The issue concludes with six book reviews on widely disparate topics, including books on Cuba's export of revolutionary fervor, Britain's Neo-Nazi movement(s) and late-twentieth-century British fascism with an eye to music, a history of Jewish radicalism, a book on 1960s counter-culture in Oklahoma, and finally, a book on the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Both our book reviews and our articles obviously feature an unusually disparate array of topics that cut across the political spectrum.

As we like to remind readers as we launch a new issue, JSR seeks provide a forum for the scholarly and dispassionate analysis of radicalism of many kinds, and from many different perspectives. We continue to welcome a steady stream of excellent articles and remain the only journal in the world that focuses on the full range of political, social, and religious forms of radicalism. In coming issues, we expect to feature articles on subjects including ecological radicalism, anarchism, black bloc radicalism, and other forms of radicalism, as well as some articles on the process of radicalization and radicalism in relation to violence and non-violence. We welcome your queries, submissions, and shared conversation about these various currents of radical, political, and religious movements and individuals.

Thank you for supporting our journal, and we hope you enjoy this issue.