Customer Reviews

What's Left?: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche

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Michael Neumann is a dedicated leftist here offering a detailed critique of the radical left. For my money he's dead on, indicting radicals for their addiction to the adrenaline rush of self-righteous feelings, as opposed to the much more difficult task of actually changing things. But I have two caveats: first, the audience for this book will probably never be large, since you have to first have been exposed to enough serious (i.e., usually academic) leftism to know the terminology and concepts from Hegel to Marcuse, in order to appreciate much of Neumann's argument; second, this book was published in 1988, when the Reagan/Bush ascendancy looked as if it were at its height. Little did we know. And in response to more recent developments...the radical left has gotten more smug and even weaker. Yeesh.

At least the 80's were good for something - this is written with real fervor, with the kind of intellectual panache that is all the greater for seeming to have been ignored. Neumann's work in this slim volume needs to be read by every would-be leftist, and then worried about over morning coffee. Social theory as "useless" - enduring brilliance that needs no updating, since western political culture seems frozen since the Neumann-derided sixties. Of course, no one is going to pay 45.00 for a 1988 paperback, so this review is self-congratulation, though the good professor deserved the Left Nobel for this youthful work.