The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left In America. - Review - book reviews

For example, Rossinow shows that Greg Calvert's important theory on "the new working-class" captured the imagination of many college-educated white youths because it offered a framework where comfortable students and salaried functionaries could still understand themselves as among the alienated and exploited. Yet at the national level, leaders embraced various forms of "other-oriented" politics, and spurned the existential quest for wholeness and meaning. To many of the rank-and-file members of the new left, the endless debates that raged in the national office over who truly represented the "revolutionary vanguard" must have seemed unearthly. The great bulk of new leftists had already come to understand themselves as radical agents, and when the Weather Underground issued their manifesto, "You Don't Need A Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows," Austinites ridiculed their agenda with the counter- slogan: "You Don't Need A Rectal Thermometer to Know Who the Assholes Are."

Rossinow further explains that "the end of SDS did not mean, at least not immediately, the end of the new left." [6] This is particularly true with regard to the feminist left, which actually saw an opportunity to escape the macho gender politics that permeated the organization. Between roughly 1969 and 1973, radical feminists spent as much time promoting "anti-war, anti-imperialist, environmentalist, antiracist, prolabor, and general leftist activities as ... specifically gender-related issues," and like the new left generally, they saw an inextricable connection between social problems and their personal quest for authenticity. Along with the rest of the movement, these women "were determined to alter their own minds, their own values and personal ideals, as well as to change institutional and social structures." [7]

It is also refreshing to finally see an investigation of new left history from the perspective of someone with no clear axe to grind (and who in fact is too young to even remember the movement). Given the contested nature of the sixties and the heavy implications of work in this field for the political present, too many of the recent studies in this area seem fraught with a lack of balance. As Maurice Isserman lamented in a provocative essay nearly ten years ago, "the history of the New Left has been told almost exclusively from the perspective of those who had direct experience in the movement and continue to share at least some of its original assumptions." [8] But unlike many of these writers, Rossinow actually gathered a great deal of new research for his book, exploring manuscript and oral history collections, university archives, underground newspapers, and interviewing nearly 60 activists. As such, one senses that his distance from the field has helped him to sharped a sense of critical detachment and --although most people are afraid to even use the word nowadays--a measure of "objectivity" that helps to promote good history.

Finally, as Rossinow well understands, it could hardly be more ironic that the notion of writing "history from below" has almost completely eluded those who actually write about the era from whence this ethos came. The pioneering, bottom-up approach of this book not only complicates our understanding of the new left's emergence in conservative enclaves like Austin, but also helps to explain the course of the movement after it took its radical turn in about 1965. In drawing such complex links between the political energy of the new left and the larger cultural politics that helped to spawn this movement, Rossinow's study is largely unprecedented. Even readers who quibble with some of his generalizations will benefit from his formidable research, and the rigor and keen analytic power that Rossinow brings to his study are impressive. As the shelf of literature exploring the history of the 1960s expands in the coming years, one suspects that The Politics of Authenticity will go a long way towards earning a wider acceptance of this field as a suitable arena for serious academic inquiry.