scholarly journals The Reception of E.P. Thompson in Japan: The New Left, The Making, and “Moral Economy”

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
Hideo Ichihashi

AbstractThis article traces the chequered history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in postwar Japan and tries to assess what kind of impact his thoughts and ideas had on the Japanese intellectual world. In so doing, this article will draw on interviews with several academics in Japan from various generations as well as written documents. The article begins with a survey of postwar left-wing politics in Japan, against which background Thompson was introduced as a New Left thinker. It also considers the National History Movement, whose problematic legacy seemed to condition the reception of The Making of the English Working Class in Japan in the 1960s. After exploring the limited reception of The Making among Japanese historians, we witness the more favourable reception of the concept of “moral economy”. The article demonstrates that the rather awkward history of the reception of E.P. Thompson in Japan cannot be understood without referring to the postwar concerns of Japanese intellectuals, concerns that changed fairly dramatically in the course of time.

2009 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Miller Klubock ◽  
Paulo Fontes

Labor history and public history have had a long relationship in the United States, as James Green argues in Taking History to Heart, dating back to Progressive-era historians like Mary Ritter and Charles A. Beard. Labor historians like Phillip Foner, who identified with the “Old Left,” made labor history public history through ties to labor organizations and the Communist Party. Then, during the 1960s, historians identified with the “New Left” and inspired by E.P. Thompson, worked to extend social history and working-class history “from the bottom up” beyond the confines of the academy, even as they shifted their focus from the institutional histories of unions and political parties, to make the history of “ordinary people” and “everyday life” public history. The organization of history workshops and the proliferation of oral history projects reflect the ways in which historians of the working class made their practices public history in new ways during the 1960s and 1970s while expanding the sphere of both “the public” and “labor” to include histories of women, gender and patriarchy, and ethnic and racial minorities.


Stirrings ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Lana Dee Povitz

Using the conceptual lens of terroir, this chapter provides an overview of hunger and poverty in the United States, starting with the urban liberalism of the 1960s and tracing the onset of austerity politics from mid-1970s through the early 2000s. It shows how New York City food activism was connected to an array of apparently unrelated social movements, including American Communism, community control, the countercultural New Left, feminism, Black Power, and AIDS activism. As governments reduced spending on social programs, leaders from these movements formed nonprofit organizations geared toward providing services, such as emergency meals and low-cost groceries. This chapter offers an overview of why and how service provision came to absorb the attention of late-twentieth century activists and shows how nonprofit kitchens and offices became sites of mentorship. As charismatic, overwhelmingly female leaders passed on values and strategies forged in earlier eras, they enacted activist genealogies that helped sustain political involvement over decades. Powerful interpersonal bonds and people’s own sense of being transformed by their activism illuminate the underappreciated role of emotion in the history of left-progressive movements.


Author(s):  
Alan M. Wald

A history of Irving Howe and Dissent magazine is used to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the social democratic alternative that became the Left wing of the New York intellectuals during the 1950s. This is followed by an examination of the life and work of Harvey Swados, which also express the ambiguities that would render this tradition problematic during the era of new radicalization in the 1960s.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-149
Author(s):  
Terence Renaud

AbstractThe New Left that arose in West Germany during the 1960s mimicked the antifascist reformations of the 1930s. For grassroots campaigns, extraparliamentary opposition groups, and radical student organizations of the postwar decades, the Marxist humanist theories and revolutionary socialist splinter groups of the interwar years served as attractive models. At the same time, the Sixty-eighter generation rebelled against a political establishment now represented by that earlier generation of neoleftist pioneers, their parents. But generational conflict was just the symptom of a deeper problem in the history of the midcentury Left: a succession of radical new lefts arose out of periodic frustration at institutionalized politics. This article explores the missing link between Germany’s antifascist and antiauthoritarian new lefts: the so-called left socialists of the 1950s. In particular, Ossip K. Flechtheim’s science of futurology and Wolfgang Abendroth’s theory of antagonistic society translated antifascism’s legacies into a new paradigm of social protest. The left socialists’ support for the embattled Socialist German Student League laid the organizational and intellectual foundation for the sixties New Left. Recent studies of the “global sixties” have shown the transnational connections between new lefts across space; this article explains their continuity across time.


Soundings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (74) ◽  
pp. 136-163
Author(s):  
Michael Rustin ◽  
Jeremy Gilbert

Mike Rustin discusses his lifelong involvement in the New Left, which began when he was still at school. He describes the history of the First New Left, including the role played within it by figures such as Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams, and the role of the New Left in student politics in Oxford University, where Michael was a student and a leading member of the Labour club. He looks at the changing relationships between the New Left and the Labour Party in the 1960s and the publication of the May Day Manifesto in 1967. He also discusses the founding of the New Left Review and the transition from the time of its first editor, Stuart Hall, to that of its second, Perry Anderson, as well his two terms as a member of its editorial board, and his continuing disagreements and agreements with its editorial direction. His reflections on contemporary politics include a discussion of the relationship of New Left ideas to current movements and the Labour Party, a critique of vanguardism, and the founding of Soundings.


Author(s):  
Petra Terhoeven

Which factors were responsible for the radicalization of the 1968 protest movement? Why did Germans and Italians develop such a fascination with the notion of guerilla warfare? And why were the terrorist organizations that developed there so long-lived? The reasons are partly to be found in unresolved problems of postfascist societies. New Left activists criticized the lack of domestic democracy and idealized the “anti-imperialist” fighters in the global south. But as this chapter shows, radicalization also developed through transnational interaction in the European public spheres, specifically through a mixture of solidarity and rivalry between the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades. The history of German and Italian left-wing terrorisms was, therefore, closely connected by multiple symbolic ties from the first shootings to the final showdown of the kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer during the German Autumn of 1977 and of Aldo Moro just a few months later.


2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 729-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reuel Schiller

This article examines the politics of airline deregulation in the 1970s, and the events that led to the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. It links the antibureaucratic, antiregulatory policies of the 1970s to ideas closely connected to the New Left, the counterculture, and other left-wing subcultures that dominated high and low thought in the 1960s. By linking this source of antibureaucratic sentiment to the politics of airline deregulation, this article suggests a new direction for historians who study the American state in the last decades of the twentieth century. As they focus their attention on the rise of market-based, neoliberal regulatory policies, they should look for their origins not only in the growing strength of the intellectual and political right, but also in the political thought and practice of the 1960s left.


2011 ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Roberto Perin

Summary National history is out of fashion in Canada. Since the 1960s the constitutional crisis which has challenged the unitary character of the Canadian State has had a profound impact on its historiography. It is in this troubled context that social history emerged. In seeking to reconstitute the internal history of social groups, it broke the "national" consensus that had been created around not only the interpretations, but the periodicity of traditional history. The question now arises as to whether national history still exists as a category. If so, how many national histories does Canada have? Where do the First Nations and immigrant groups fit into to this (these) national history (histories), or do they have national histories of their own?


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document