An Infantile Disorder?: The Crisis and Decline of the New Left [Hardcover]

First published in 1977. The New Left, as an organised political phenomenon, came  and went  largely in the 1960s. Was the Movement that went into precipitate decline after 1969 the same New Left that had developed a decade earlier? Nigel Youngs thesis is that the core New Left, as it had evolved by the mid-1960s, had a unique identity that set it apart from other Old Left and Marxist groups. He believes that this was dissipated in the later developments of the black and student movements, and in the opposition to the Vietnam war. By 1968  the watershed year  an acute identity-crisis had set in within the Movement and became the major source of the New Lefts disintegration.

Nigel Young traces the Movements growth and crisis mainly in Britain and America, where it reached its greater strength, but attention is also paid to parallel developments in similar movements elsewhere. He analyses the crisis in terms of the interrelationship between dilemmas of strategy and ideas, and the external events which tend to reinforce the tendencies toward elitism, intolerance and violence, and produce organisational breakdown.

Preface;  Acknowledgements;  Chronology;  Introduction;  1. Convergence and Breakthrough  2. The New Left: A Core Identity  3. A New Radicalism  4. After Reformism: The Dilemmas of Extra-Parliamentarism  5. The Problem of Agency  6. Black Movement in Crisis  7. In Search of Ideology 8. The New Left in Britain: 1956-70  9. Vietnam and Alignment  10. SDS in Flux  11. Annus Mirabilis: 1968  12. Turn Towards Violence  13. Revolution and the New Left  14. Provocation: Response and Repression  15. The new Left and the Old  16. A Crisis of Identity  17. Picking Up the Threads;  Appendix;  Notes;  SellÓ8