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John P. Diggins

The Rise and Fall Of The American Left Paperback – October 17, 1992

by John Patrick Diggins (Author)

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“Informative and useful. . . . A balanced history of leftist American politics in the 20th century. . . . Admirably nonpartisan.” ―Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

Born in America, the American Left was nurtured by intellectuals and activists who read Jefferson and Whitman before they read Marx or Mao. One lesson this brilliant history teaches us is that the fury of radical innocence and wounded idealism so peculiar to American intellectual history springs from native soil. Nor is the American Left a single phenomenon but four surprising eruptions throughout the past century: The Lyrical Left, of the First World War years; the Old Left, driven by the legacy of World War I, the promise of socialism, and the Great Depression; the New Left of the 1960s, combining a revolt against the banalities of middle-class life with civil rights fervor and protest against the war in Vietnam; and now contemporary Academic Left, seeking both to question the traditional values of the West and to embrace the causes of women and minorities.

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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

About the Author

John Patrick Diggins is the author of The Rise and Fall of the American Left and The Proud Decades: 1941–1960, in addition to biographies of John Adams and Max Weber. He is a distinguished professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He lives in New York City.

Product details

Publisher : W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.; Revised ed. edition (October 17, 1992)
Language : English
Paperback : 436 pages
ISBN-10 : 0393309177
ISBN-13 : 978-0393309171
Item Weight : 1.04 pounds
Dimensions : 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #708,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7,410 in Political Ideologies & Doctrines (Books)
- #8,042 in Political Science (Books)
- #37,651 in United States History (Books)

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evnyc

An intellectual history of the American Left

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2018

This is to counter the other negative review. This book is a thoughtful, erudite overall picture of the American intellectual left up till the 1980s. It is focused mainly, though not exclusively on academics and writers, not activists. It is also somewhat critical, though not tendentious. The author is neither adoring of the left nor hostile to them. John Patrick Diggins was a distinguished historian whose works are still read and respected and no worries, he is as reliable as any other historian; his views are informed, subtle and fair.

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Read this book to understand the left's reaction to politics since 2016

Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2018

The book was first released in the 70's and was ahead of its time. What Diggins wrote then is readily apparent in the current climate of today's politics. If you want to understand why colleges over the past 3 years have made names for themselves silencing free speech on campus, then this is a read for you. If you want to understand why all speech against the left is instantly branded hate speech, and the individuals called out as bigots and fascists, then read this book. When the truth is inadmissible because the universal nature it is given by modern leftist thought theory, then evidence is a waste of time and resources. If you want to know where the radical left ideology leads, then read The Gulag Archipelago.

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Revisionist Historian

Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2016

I regret purchasing this book before doing any research into John Patrick Diggins. From what I've gathered, the author is known as a historian that "brought a provocative, revisionist approach to the history of the American left and right" (The New York Times). The key word is "revisionist," which should not be a defining term of a historian's career. As for the book, I cannot rely on the merits of the author's revisionist reputation, so the book is completely useless as a reference or (secondary) source. I cannot trust what has or has not been "revised," or whether or not the "history" is reliable or bias. Some passages seem to evolve out of dubious assumptions. I would not mention anything from this book in the company of any credible person(s), let alone cite it in a research. One star because I feel cheated out of a book.

[Updated: 12/2018]
I am including a string of excerpts from the book to reveal some of the condescension and tendentious tone in Diggins’ own words.

(*) The conspiracy theory that college kids were being brainwashed by radical activists turned manipulative educators:

(A) “The story has now been brought up to 1990 [expanded version], a curious time when the Left in the United States has no political significance but considerable educational influence, no power to affect immediate events but considerable authority to shape the minds of the young” (15).

(B) “It may be that the failures are inherent in its promises, particularly if one sees the goals of the Left as impossible to realize. At this point the temptation arises to taunt the Left with the label ‘utopian,’ pinned on those who are supposedly out of touch with reality. Yet striving after another world in defiance of reality is the Left’s categorical imperative” (23).

(C) “In the decades following the sixties, many veterans of the generation found themselves in the academic world, and the task now seemed to be not primarily to advocate political change but to rediscover what had been lost to the forces of historical change. As historians and political theorists, New Left academics would write about the American past with romantic determination to find there what they could never find in the American present outside their own enclaves: moral community, feminine consciousness, and a radical working class. […] they sought also to change the past itself by ‘redescribing’ new, radical ways of looking at it, that is devising a vocabulary to change our view of reality” (29).

(D) With no constituency in the real world, the New Left had no choice but to ascend to the ivory towers of theory” (289).

(E) “The non-WASP students demanded that education enhance their self-esteem and cultural identity, and faculty member who offended their sensibilities were often savaged for political incorrectness” (297).

(F) “The politicization of the campus in the late eighties and nineties has puzzled those who wonder why American colleges seem to be radical while the rest of the wold has turned more and more conservative” (297).

Finally, to the prospective buyer who has read this far, I don’t know what else to tell you. The first publication of this book was in 1973, The American Left in the Twentieth Century. But for whatever reason, Diggins felt sure enough of himself to revise the title to its current Rise and Fall, which doesn’t seem to be the case in light of events from the past few years. My rating of this book remains at one star.

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