Buy new:

$34.99

$3.99 delivery: July 22 - 27

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

$$34.99 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from	The Denver Bookcase
Sold by	The Denver Bookcase

Details

Ships from

The Denver Bookcase

Sold by

The Denver Bookcase

Return policy: This item is returnable

Other Sellers on Amazon

$38.01
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: KnowledgePond

$38.01
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: Sandy Dunes Surplus

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Richard Ellis

The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Modern War Studies) Hardcover – March 1, 1998

by Richard J. Ellis (Author)

10 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$34.99

$10.86

Paperback

"Please retry"

$10.94

$44.29

$6.04

In an effort to toughen the liberal reform tradition in the US, Ellis (politics, Willamette U.) discusses the recurrent organizational and ideological dilemmas that have periodically thrown radical egalitarian political thinkers and movements down illiberal tracks. He eschews analysis of the psychology of individual activists in favor of a focus on the cultural significance of the dilemmas. His episodic coverage addresses such phenomena as utopian fiction of the late 19th century, the 1960s New Left, and the environmentalism of Earth First! Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Print length

426 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Univ Pr of Kansas
Publication date

March 1, 1998
Dimensions

6.75 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches
ISBN-10

0700608753
ISBN-13

978-0700608751
See all details

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Bertrand de Jouvenel
39
Paperback
29 offers from $12.89
J. F. Bosher
4
Paperback
42 offers from $2.98
Stefan Zweig
18
Hardcover
8 offers from $68.66
Edgar Lee Masters
15
Hardcover
14 offers from $34.98
Joel Kotkin
260
Hardcover
40 offers from $14.49
Arthur Bryant
5
Paperback
11 offers from $20.70

Get everything you need

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Bradley Campbell
108
Paperback
30 offers from $26.97

Special offers and product promotions

Amazon Business: Make the most of your Amazon Business account with exclusive tools and savings. Login now

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his second paragraph, Ellis quickly points out that he is a lifelong Democrat, a "card-carrying member" of the ACLU, an environmentalist, a supporter of women's rights and a federalist. If it seems rather defensive, that is, in some way, the point of his book. Here, Ellis (American Political Cultures) offers a provocative critique of left-wing movements from 19th-century utopians to abolitionists to the old left of the inter-war era, to the New Left of the Vietnam era and, finally, to contemporary radical feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and certain environmental activists. Through an examination of speeches, books and articles, Ellis tries to document how varied ideologues abandoned their egalitarian principles in favor of rigid political correctness, sometimes slipping into violence and elitism. At root, Ellis sees a tendency to romanticize "the People"?"those powerful, natural persons whose heroism needs no drug of fame or applause to enable them to continue: those humble, mighty parts of the mass," to quote American Communist Michael Gold?while, to quote Gold again, denigrating "the simple souls who save their money, plod to offices, and plan college careers for their children." This is a largely academic study that attempts to lump in Walt Whitman and Tom Hayden with various extremists. The problem is Ellis's arguments often tend to be as reductionist and simplistic as the radical rhetoric he criticizes.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Richard J. Ellis is a liberal who acknowledges a certain amount of discomfort writing a book that is critical of the left. He nonetheless does a good--often devastating--job of it." -- Washington Times

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Univ Pr of Kansas (March 1, 1998)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 426 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0700608753
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0700608751
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #956,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #644 in Radical Political Thought
- #3,109 in Political Philosophy (Books)

Customer Reviews:
10 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		88%
4 star 0% (0%)		0%
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star		12%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Charles D. Evans

Warnings Progressives should heed.

Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2018

Verified Purchase

Excellent and well developed criticism by someone on the left.
It takes the idealistic aspirations of the left, and shows how they can lead to authoritarianism.
Quick abstract: The road to hell can often be paved with good intentions.

Helpful

Snipe

An outstanding book

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2009

Verified Purchase

Ellis is a lefty, but at least he's able to look a bit realistically at the data. I think the blurb (above) misses Ellis' point. The "Dark Side" of the left is that force is ALWAYS needed to obtain its goals. It's not an accident or leaving the principles to become violent, it is a natural and logical extension of those principles.

While those on the left talk incessantly about how "compassionate" they are, the Dark Side of the Left is that there MUST be force to make a left system work.

This is a great book, and one well worth having.

8 people found this helpful

Helpful

Frederick Tressler

I bought the book specifically for the material on John ...

Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2016

Verified Purchase

I bought the book specifically for the material on John Brown for use in a history paper, but the rest of the book looks interesting as well. Now to find time to read it in its entirety.

Helpful

Johnny

Absolutely Fabulous, Darling!

Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2001

Verified Purchase

Loved it. Cheers, thanks a lot!

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Oliver Kamm

Rigorous and salutary analysis of utopianism

Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2001

This is a terrific work of cultural history, literary criticism and political philosophy. Ellis declares early in his book his own liberal-left political sympathies, before proceeding to identify the inherent illiberalism of much that has passed for left-wing thought in American history. His range is wide, and his knowledge of American culture impressive. But what is most devastating about his descriptions and analysis of the romantic illusions he catalogues is his awareness of the ostensible justice of the claims underlying them.
The abolitionist movement against slavery was a great moral cause, yet it included a wing devoted to violent and messianic extremism. The early activists in Students for a Democratic Society at least were aware of the need to formulate their demands in the language of liberal rights, before veering into advocacy of Maoist terrorism. Ellis traces these developments not to any simplistic teleology of the collapse of radical ideals into totalitarianism, but to the implict illiberalism of believing that all good things are necessarily compatible with each other, and that mere preferences (environmental protection, for example) should be treated as moral axioms. The sharpest analysis of this phenomenon in the book is Ellis's devastating exegesis of Edward Bellamy's now-forgotten but once vastly-influential utopian novel Looking Backward. Because the scheme of social organisation depicted in the novel has no awareness of how to reconcile conflicting claims to scarce resources or incommensurable values, the vision that it propounds is one of unabashed totalitarianism. Illiberalism and even totalitarianism are integral parts of the American left now; Ellis demonstrates how and why that intellectual tradition developed.

23 people found this helpful

Helpful

Ward Dorrity

The intoxication of power

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2009

Eric Blair, writing under the pen name of George Orwell had these monsters pretty well pegged:

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.
Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.

What pure power means you will understand presently.

We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods,but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.

They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.

We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

The object of persecution is persecution.
The object of torture is torture.
The object of power is power".
-George Orwell, 1984

This is what most people miss. Even Richard Ellis never quite gets around to this central fact in his book. It is the desire, the intoxication of absolute power exercised without moral restraint or conscience of any kind that has led to recent history's worst mass murder, atrocity and enslavement of humankind.

Guess what, folks - the same ideas that have animated recent history's practitioners of slaughter and slavery now have a happy home in the White house.

We have plenty of cautionary tales. And it's not a Democrat/Republican issue. They're all either drunk with the tantalizing premise of absolute power or are in fear of it. None of them - none - are fit to live in a free society.

We now have but two choices: submit to those behind that Marxist meat puppet who currently occupies the White House and in so doing become slaves and cattle - OR stand up, resist, and take it back from them. And never let them near anything that even hints of power again. Whatever that takes.

You're not going to get another chance. History is my witness.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Aristotle's Beast

Much needed antidote

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2000

This book is unbeatable. It covers numerous different attempts to found radical egalitarian communities, charting some very telling failures and stupidities that they ran into. It sports a devastating final chapter on the evil intent in the demand for more equality than it is reasonable to assume we could ever bring into being. The demand for ever more equality is a self-promotion, it is a vain strut, a moral pose that makes one important, ups your status. The radical moralizer is a wanna-be priest.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Buy new:

$34.99

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

Similar authors to follow

The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Modern War Studies) Hardcover – March 1, 1998

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Customers also viewed these products

Get everything you need

Special offers and product promotions

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Review

From the Back Cover

About the Author

From The Washington Post

Product details

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Customers who bought this item also bought

Buy new: $34.99

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

Similar authors to follow

The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Modern War Studies) Hardcover – March 1, 1998

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Customers also viewed these products

Get everything you need

Special offers and product promotions

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Review

From the Back Cover

About the Author

From The Washington Post

Product details

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Customers who bought this item also bought

Buy new:

$34.99