It is a damaging and oft-levelled charge that the British Left is parochial and ill-informed about the international working class movement. It is certainly true that most of us have only hazy ideas about the history and theories of the North American left. The student, Black-Power and anti-war movements seem to us to have entered the political stage full-grown and without antecedents. In his books Professor Bottomore has sketched in the history of radical thought in America which will enable us to place the present American left in perspective.
The book is based on a series of talks that T.B. Bottomore gave for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. He has not concentrated on political and social movements, but rather on the connection between intellectual dissent and theories of society, and the work of thinkers who elaborated critical theories of society.
MUCKRAKERS
His first subjects are the muckrakers: those journalists who at the turn of the century devoted themselves to sensational exposures of the ills of American society. The high point of muckraking was reached with the publication of "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, which dealt with the exploitation of workers by the meat-packing trusts. The American public was shocked - not by the misery but by the description of unhygienic conditions in the meat industry and the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed by Congress.
In the 20's and the 30's the marxists became a force in the American left. Dos Passos and James T. Farrell wrote proletarian novels while Sidney Hook and Edmund Wilson initiated the development of an American-oriented marxism - a development that never occurred.
American radical thought is traced through the Slough of McCarthyism to the present renaissance [illegible] the North American left. It is not a [illegible] definitive account and his appreciation of rival theoretical tendencies can be faulted, but as a [illegible].
* CRITICS OF SOCIETY by T.B. Bottomore, Allen & Unwin, 25/-