In his book, New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition, Terence Renaud argues that a basic continuity existed between three moments in the history of the German and Western European left: radical antifascism in the 1920s-30s, left socialism in the 1940s-50s, and anti-authoritarianism in the 1960s. In the 1960s, the radical youth of Western Europe’s New Left rebelled against the democratic welfare state and their parents’ antiquated politics of reform. It was not the first time an upstart leftist movement was built on the ruins of the old. Renaud demonstrates why the left in Europe underwent a series of internal revolts against the organizational forms of established parties and unions. He describes how small groups of militant youth such as New Beginning in Germany tried to sustain grassroots movements without reproducing the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and supposedly obsolete structures of Social Democracy and Communism. Neoleftist militants experimented with alternative modes of organization such as councils, assemblies, and action committees. However, Renaud reveals that these same militants, decades later, often came to defend the very institutions they had opposed in their youth.
Providing vital historical perspective on the challenges confronting leftists today, this book tells the story of generations of antifascists, left socialists, and anti-authoritarians who tried to build radical democratic alternatives to capitalism and kindle hope in reactionary times. Over the course of our conversation we will talk not just about Prof. Terence Renaud’s revisionist periodization of the emergence of the “New Left” beyond the Long Sixties, but also the broader intellectual and political stakes of this history for antisystemic and anti-capitalist mobilization today.
Terence Renaud is a historian of modern Europe who specializes in German intellectual history, revolutions, and international social movements. He is currently a lecturer in the Humanities Program and Department of History at Yale University. At Yale he teaches in Directed Studies and offers interdisciplinary seminars on European intellectual history, theories and practices of resistance, and modern revolutions. He received his Ph.D. in history with an emphasis on critical theory from the University of California, Berkeley. Renaud’s work has appeared in academic journals such as Modern Intellectual History, The Historical Journal, and New German Critique as well as popular magazines such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and Foreign Policy. His new research project concerns the visual history of capitalism in Europe and North America, as represented in cartoons, caricatures, and other images of social hierarchy around the turn of the twentieth century.
He discusses his work with Kelvin Ng, a PhD candidate at the Yale History Department and historian of the modern Indian Ocean. Kelvin’s research interests include intellectual history, political economy, and histories of the left.
