New Left
History
Philosophical History of the New Left
Arran Gare:
"Anglophone philosophy in the Twentieth Century was characterized by the triumph and domination of Analytic philosophy inspired by advances in symbolic logic. This had its roots in Nineteenth Century developments in logic but came to dominate in the early Twentieth Century where it was developed in opposition to Idealism. However, in opposing metaphysics it also involved sidelining the process metaphysics of C.S. Peirce, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead and Robin Collingwood.
Idealism and process metaphysics were inspired by the humanism of the German Renaissance, and opposition to them developed as a strong form of antihumanism, although some ordinary language analytic philosophers offered some support for humanism. Analytic philosophy, which originated in Germany, evolved from logical atomism to logical positivism before being countered by ordinary language philosophy. While logical atomism was apparently abandoned, many Analytic philosophers remained committed to logical positivism, or more broadly, logical empiricism, while formulating this as a form of naturalism. In doing so, they preserved logical atomism, with knowledge coming to be understood as information (Dretske, 1981). Logical positivism provided a defence of reductionist science, with later proponents such as Quine claiming that philosophy is part of science rather than the humanities.
As C.D. Broad (1947) observed, Analytic philosophers were excluding two of the other essential components of philosophical thinking, synopses (which means “viewing together”) whereby contradictions between diverse domains of culture could be exposed, and synthetic thinking whereby new ways of understanding the world could be developed to overcome such contradictions.
Synopses are also an essential to historical thinking and to appreciating the context of anything being examined. Imagination, seldom taken seriously by Analytic philosophers, is essential for both synopses and syntheses. Unsurprisingly, Analytic philosophy became increasingly self-referential, concerned with paradoxes generated by its own deep assumptions that they had placed beyond questioning. As Robert Hanna (2001) has shown, these paradoxes derive from having ignored some of Kant’s crucial insights.
In USA, this narrowing of philosophy had been opposed by John Dewey and Whitehead, while in Britain it had been opposed by Collingwood.
Collingwood had been a major historian of philosophy with an extremely broad range of interests, including the history of Roman Britain. At Collingwood’s untimely death in 1943 at the age of 53, he was replaced by Gilbert Ryle who differentiated Analytic philosophy from “continental philosophy,” dismissing the latter as of no value (Monk, 2019). While this included German, Italian, and Spanish philosophy, continental philosophy was usually identified with French philosophy. That Analytic philosophy originated in Austria and Germany was ignored, along with the rest of the history of philosophy. Similar attitudes developed in USA in the 1950s in an intellectual environment in which academics were intimidated by the McCarthy witch-hunts against leftists, and W.V.O. Quine came to dominate philosophy at Harvard University (McCumber, 2001).
Some of the younger Anglophone philosophers, dissatisfied with the sterility, limited scope and triviality of most Analytic philosophy, were attracted to “continental philosophy” (although some remained faithful to Peirce, Dewey, Whitehead or Collingwood). However, the real catalyst for the turn to “continental philosophy” was the rise of the New Left.
The New Left emerged in Britain in the 1950s as a movement influenced by Marx, but following the invasion by the Soviet Union of Hungary and revelations of how oppressive Stalin had been by Khrushchev in 1956, its proponents were highly critical of East European communism and totally hostile to Stalinist tendencies of communist parties in the West. In place of the scientism of orthodox Marxism, they embraced and defended humanistic forms of Marxism (if they did not move on to become post-Marxists), looking back to Marx’s early works, most importantly, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This was associated with a revival of interest in Hegel. While in the USA the journal Dissent, first published in 1954 could be taken as the first New Left publication, in Britain this movement began with the publication of Universities & Left Review and The New Reasoner, which both began publication in 1957 and were then combined in the New Left Review, first published in 1960. Charles Taylor, one of the editors of Universities & Left Review, had written his Ph.D. at Oxford on alienation from Hegel to existentialism. The contributors to The New Reasoner defined themselves as humanist Marxists or humanist socialists, in opposition to the scientific socialism of the Soviet Marxism. Contributors included Jean-Paul Sartre, whose essay was published in the first issue, attacking the Stalinism of the French Communist Party, the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson who wrote a two-part article on socialist humanism, Charles Taylor who wrote on Marxism and humanism, and Alasdair MacIntyre who wrote a review of Herbert Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism and a two-part paper entitled “The Moral Wilderness.” There was also a study of Pasternack’s book Dr Zhivago by Doris Lessing. These writings indicated a concern to provide Marxism or post-Marxist socialism with the humanist political philosophy and the ethics that Soviet Marxism lacked. There was also an article on the African National Congress and their struggle against colonialism, translations of the writings of Antonio Gramsci and studies of Yugoslavia’s efforts to create industrial democracy. The first issues of the New Left Review contained further articles by Thompson, Taylor and MacIntyre on Marxist humanism, ethics and community, and also major contributions by Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams focussing on culture as constitutive of social and economic relations while examining the effects of advertising, television and the mass media. Other forms of oppression were also examined, including existing gender relations. In examining Marx’s work, the focus was on the concepts of alienation, reification, and commodity fetishism rather than the base-superstructure model of society. These articles revealed the conception of humanity underpinning Marx’s critique of political economy and capitalist social relations to have been diametrically opposed to the Hobbesian view of humans. The perspective of the left had been vastly broadened by such work and generated a revival of interest in German and French philosophy. MacIntyre published a book on Marx’s relation to Hegel, Feuerbach, and later Marxists, and to Christianity (1968/1995), and Taylor wrote a major study of Hegel (1975).
The New Left developed in other countries along similar lines. In USA, the early proponents were C. Wright Mills and Erich Fromm, both associated with the journal Dissent, and Herbert Marcuse became increasingly influential. Fromm and Marcuse were both refugees from Nazi Germany who had been members of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, but unlike other members of the Frankfurt School, remained in USA. Fromm published a translation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in 1964 and developed a humanist form of psychotherapy that supported a critique of both Naziism and bureaucratic capitalism. Marcuse was a Marxist, but also strongly influenced by Hegel, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger. He published Reason and Revolution (1954), an interpretation and defence of Hegel’s thought against the charge that it supported fascism, at the same time defending T.H. Green’s neo-Hegelian political philosophy and attacking positivist social science. He then published Soviet Marxism in 1958, a scathing analysis of the Soviet Union, and One Dimensional Man in 1964, a damning critique of American culture. Living in a society dominated by the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower had called it, Marcuse (1964, p.1) began this work by claiming that “[a] comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.” With the total domination of society by instrumental reason, people had reached a higher stage of alienation where alienation was just accepted, without any genuine opposition because reason had been redefined to make opposition unintelligible. The positivism of Analytic philosophers with their highly restrictive notion of reason served to blind students to even the possibility of any alternative. French existential phenomenology also played a major role in the development of the New Left, mainly through the influence of Sartre, but also of Maurice MerleauPonty (who died in 1961) and his students. For students studying philosophy, existential phenomenology provided an alternative to Analytic philosophy, and particularly as formulated by Sartre, demanded of its adherents political commitment.
French phenomenology was inspired by Husserl and Heidegger, and influenced by Hegelian thought, but also by the thought of Henri Bergson, particularly in the importance accorded to temporality, embodiment, and agency. As Sartre argued, existentialism is a form of humanism. The existentialist movement was in fact an affirmation of a strong form of humanism, and in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960/76), Sartre offered a synthesis of existential phenomenology and humanist Marxism. This provided a characterization of how political movements develop from individual protest to joint praxis to overcome the practico-inert ensembles which serialize and alienate people from each other. It upheld a vision of the future in which society would be free of these practico-inert ensembles, although he showed how such ensembles tend to re-form after revolutions, explaining in the process the trajectory of the Bolshevik revolution. Such ideas had an influence well beyond philosophy and politics and were taken up in psychology and psychiatry in opposition to behaviourism and a sterile for of Freudian psychoanalysis. Sartre’s ideas were popularized in Anglophone countries by the existentialist psychotherapist R.D. Laing and D.G. Cooper in Reason and Violence (1964).
The spirit of the New Left influenced science and the way it was understood.
The attacks by historically oriented philosophers of science on logical positivism, such as Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, Michael Polanyi, Norwood Russell Hanson, Stephen Toulmin, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and later, Robert Young, were embraced, opening again the possibility of examining, critiquing and replacing the assumptions of mainstream science. In the 1950s biology had been dominated by the synthetic theory of evolution, molecular biology, and information science, upholding the reductionist view of life that culminated in the rise of sociobiology. The theoretical biology movement begun in the 1930s in Britain by Marxists influenced by Whitehead’s process metaphysics, led by Joseph Needham and C.H. Waddington, had been well and truly suppressed, despite outstanding achievements. However, Waddington had continued his work, and set out to revive theoretical biology in the late 1960s, culminating in international conferences on theoretical biology at Bellagio, Switzerland between 1968 and 1972, the proceedings of which were edited and published in four volumes by Waddington as Towards a Theoretical Biology (1968-72). This brought together not only leading opponents of reductionist biology, including Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, but also a leading theoretical physicist, David Bohm, and a leading mathematician, René Thom. At these conferences, the positivist view of science was totally rejected and the importance of metaphysics to science strongly affirmed. Waddington explained the importance of Whitehead for the development of new concepts in embryology. He and other participants at these conferences, including his student, Brian Goodwin, took up the issue of ecological destruction, and Goodwin and those aligned with him, including Mae-Wan Ho, became leading figures in the global environmental movement, calling for a radical transformation of societies to avoid ecological destruction.
The development of the New Left in the West influenced philosophers in Eastern European countries, who also turned to the early works of Marx. This was less so in the Soviet Union where the radical thinkers of the 1920s had been suppressed and often executed. However, even in the Soviet Union, ideas developed in the 1920s were revived with the formation of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle, and with the emergence of theoretical biology, making links with the theoretical biology movement in Britain. This involved reviving work in ecology, a discipline that had been severely suppressed in the 1930s, and setting the stage for the later development of biosemiotics and ecosemiotics. The journal of this school of semiotics, Sign System Studies, began publication in 1964. In other East European countries humanist Marxism was taken up and promoted. In Poland, a leading Marxist philosopher, Adam Schaff, published A Philosophy of Man in 1963, a collection of essays in which he engaged with Sartre’s existentialism and examined varieties of humanism. At this stage he was supported by Leszek Kolakowski, who later became famous for his critique of Marxism. In Czechoslovakia, Karel Kosík published his Dialectic of the Concrete (1976), a reformulation of Marxism through Hegel and Heidegger, also in 1963. Influenced by Western Marxism, the Praxis School of Marxism was founded in Yugoslavia, publishing the journal Praxis from 1964 onwards. In 1965 Erich Fromm published an anthology, Socialist Humanism, with contributions from humanist Marxists from Yugoslavia, England, Italy, France, Senegal, Poland, Germany, USA, Australia, India, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, including an essay by Kosík. Kosík became a leading figure in the “Prague Spring” in 1968, the quest to create “socialism with a human face.” This led to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by other communist countries (with the notable exception of Rumania, whose leaders denounced it). A student, Jan Palach, self-immolated in protest. Kosík was sacked from his position in 1970, but in the 1990s, with the restoration of capitalism, became a leading left-wing social critic. This invasion of Czechoslovakia was supported by all Western communist parties, revealing their opposition to Marxist humanism.
Students were radicalized around the world. In the USA, racial discrimination became the first major target of the New Left, followed by opposition to the Vietnam War. As opposition to the Vietnam War grew, a more general understanding and opposition to neo-colonialism developed. Neo-colonialism involved dominating Third World countries by overthrowing elected governments and imposing corrupt dictatorships supposedly defending the “Free World” in order to extract their natural resources. In Britain, West Germany and France, the New Left emerged to oppose the nuclear arms race and the military-industrial complex associated with NATO, and also to changes taking place in universities which undermined their autonomy from the military and from business interests. These movements erupted in 1968, most famously in Paris, but also in Prague, where students played a major role in the Prague Spring. In the USA, the New Left were a major force for ending the Vietnam War. In the 1970s people inspired by the New Left in Scandinavia, Australia, Germany, USA, and other countries turned to ecological problems as the focus of their opposition to the domination of societies by market forces and bureaucracies. The essence of this turn was expressed by Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher, in his seminal essay “The Shallow and the Deep: Long-Range Ecological Movements” (1973), promoting an ethics and politics of self-realization, and also by the work of Murray Bookchin who inspired the Social Ecology movement. The vanguard of the New Left entered environmental politics, setting up Green political parties and going on to build a global green movement.
However, the New Left as a political movement had already begun to disintegrate. The student protests that swept the world demonstrated a lack of direction and exposed divisions, for instance between middle-class students and the working class, between pacifists and those promoting violent insurrection, and between counter-cultural libertines opposed to any constraints on individuals and those promoting participatory democracy. In the USA, Students for a Democratic Society, founded in 1962, dissolved in 1969 when the Weatherman faction walked out. In France student protests in May 1968 which led to a general strike, amounted to an insurrection against the government and was supported by Sartre, Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, while Louis Althusser, the opponent of humanist Marxism, and Foucault, did not get involved. However, the students were not aspiring to state power and achieved very little. The general population demonstrated their opposition to what had happened in elections the following year when the Gaullists achieved an overwhelming majority. In Italy, German, and the USA the New Left spawned violent revolutionary groups: for example, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, and the Weathermen and Black Panthers in USA. Many New Leftists took inspiration from the Cultural Revolution in China and became Maoists. Others aligned themselves with Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary. They believed that they were igniting a global revolution against imperialism and all forms oppression, and capitalism. They were a real threat to those in power by virtue of their violence. The Red Brigades abducted and executed Italy’s Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978. They were isolated from the general population, and their call for a global revolution involved no clear vision of what they were aspiring to. What they did do, however, was to mobilize opposition to themselves. In France, many of those caught up by the New Left in 1968 became disillusioned with all left-wing politics and united to form the anti-Marxist nouveaux philosophes movement in the late 70s. These were the precursors of postmodernism as it was articulated by François Lyotard, as Alex Callinicos (1989, p.4) observed. In China, reaction against the excesses of Mao’s Cultural Revolution facilitated the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping, the dismantling of Mao’s legacy and the integration of China into the global market. It was in this context that many philosophers turned their backs on New Left humanism.
All this could be seen as a failure of the New Left, or alternatively, as a failure of most students caught up by the New Left movement to understand what is required to liberate people and create a genuinely democratic social order. The supposedly radical students of the 1960s had not only lost the plot of the New Left; it became evident that many of them had barely understood it in the first place. Those promoting violent insurrection had not taken onboard that the Bolshevik seizure of power under the leadership of Lenin purporting to represent the proletariat had paved the way for the rise of a Stalinist police state. And counter-culturalists were too preoccupied with themselves to take anything else onboard. Another factor is that those who adopted violent tactics provoked a reaction against their radical ideas, leading to the development of a New Right.
The New Right used the violent elements of New Left to legitimate the imposition of law and order while co-opting the hedonism of the counter-cultural fraction of the New Left in order to promote consumerism. The result was the triumph of Neoliberalism."
Source
* Article: Arran Gare, Against Posthumanism: Posthumanism as the World Vision of House-Slaves. Borderless Philosophy 4 (2021): 1-56.