Customer Reviews

Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky

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If you love politics, you won't want to miss this little book that's filled with great stories. Saul Alinsky was the Godfather of Community Organizing, whose brilliant tactics inspired Hillary Clinton (Alinsky wanted to hire her out of college) and Obama, but whose genius these days can be seen most effectively in the tea party protests against Obama's health care reforms and against establishment politics in general. Von Hoffman worked with Alinsky in the 60s and his first-hand account of Chicago politics, and the larger-than-life rogues and heroes who dominated the city, as well as the Catholic Church in that era, is a treat for any history buff.

Nicholas Von Hoffman's reverential memoir of Saul Alinsky is well written, enlightening and thought provoking. Based on Hoffman's intimate recollections of 10 years working with him, Alinsky emerges as a sympathetic almost likable character. Hoffman portrays a man deeply committed to making democracy work for all, especially those who appear to be chronically powerless and victims of various forms of institutional prejudice, neglect and malevolence.
Anyone who has struggled against the "powers that be" will surely recognize the importance of many of the organizational principles Alinsky championed. In his own terms there is not really that much to object to in Alinsky's activities. Besides noise, disruption and tumult nobody appears to have been hurt. According to Hoffman, Saul Alinsky was against large government, exploitation of people, physical violence and fascism as practiced by the left and right. His world view and pursuit of social justice certainly clicked with many powerful players within the Chicago Catholic Church including Jacques Maritain, the notable and thoughtful Catholic philospher, and among more liberal Chicago plutocrats.
Alinsky was a man of action; a man who did whatever he could to get things done so that ordinary people could gain more control over their own lives. He believed in and practiced bully politics - Chicago style - and was very good at it. He was among the first and more thoughtful of the pot bangers.
So why does he and his tactics engender so much hostility and visceral hatred from so many - even those who share his interest in social justice? Why does he receive more openly hostile criticism than Gandhi and Martin Luther King? Alas Hoffman's book does little to address this issue. Was Alinsky a Marxist? Perhaps, but Hoffman says not. Was he a fellow traveller? Again, Hoffman provides little evidence and largely argues that Alinsky distrusted communists and handwringing liberals. I suspect that Alinsky would say that it is because ultimately one has to think hard about the ends that you are trying to achieve and that many who practice his means (tactics) are unwilling to speak frankly about the ends that they are pursuing. At least the Tea Party folks who have adopted his "Rules for Radicals" as their play book are more than ready to explicitly state their ends. Hoffman, despite his condescending and disparaging attitude towards and his simplistic characterization of the Tea Party, acknowledges that Alinsky would have no problem with the Tea Party adopting his tactics in their effort to give voice to their legitimate interests to reign in bloated bureaucracies and greedy public unions.
I would be interested in references to other accurate but less reverential biographies and more objective discussions of Alinsky's various campaigns.

This is a rambling memory of the radical who influenced this author when he first moved to Chicago and the current President of the USA, Obama. There are a lot of interesting stories, but not cohesive.