The Search for Political Community American Activists Reinventing Commitment [Hardcover]

Study of environmental groups assessing different cultures of political commitment in post-traditional society.Rather than criticize individualism and favor a return to traditional values, this text examines the untraditional, personalized politics of many recent social movements. It invites us to rethink common understandings of commitment, community, and individualism in a post-traditional world.Rather than criticize individualism and favor a return to traditional values, this text examines the untraditional, personalized politics of many recent social movements. It invites us to rethink common understandings of commitment, community, and individualism in a post-traditional world.This book challenges the myth that individualism necessarily weakens commitments to the common good. It examines environmental and other activist groups in which individualism sometimes enhances political commitment. Rather than criticize individualism and favor a return to traditional values, Paul Lichterman examines the untraditional, personalized politics of many recent social movements and invites us to rethink common understandings of commitment, community, and individualism in a post-traditional world.1. Personalism and political commitment; 2. Personalized politics: the case of the US Greens; 3. Speaking out in suburbia; 4. Imagining community, organizing community; 5. Culture, class, and life-ways of activism; 6. Personalized politics and cultural radicalism since the 1960s; 7. The search for political community; Appendices. The Search for Political Community is theoretically stimulating.... both wide-ranging and synthetic....This book does more than merely draw upon new social movement theory and social science writings on the culture of modernity to analyze the environmental movement. Lichterman uses this movement for the purpose of developing fresh conceptual tools that help us to understand the new repertoires of collective action dotting the Americna political landscalĩ