THE NEW RADICALISM

by Bryan Magee ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Mr. Magee has been many things: television reporter, philosopher, novelist, ritic, and candidate for Parliament; but most of all, he will strike the reader as every practical, progressive young man with a gift for expression that is loud and ar. His book also is many things: a repudiation of Marxism, conservatism, and other kinds of authoritarianism; a well-developed rational defense of free institutions; a withering analysis of the British Labour Party (his own party); and an argument for world government. But, like him, his book's distinguishing eature is its practicality. By most American definitions, his approach is neither new nor radical, except in degree; politicians should cease their haggling over definitions, terminology, first principles: ""Politics is doing, not saying or riting or thinking,"" and the only ends that matter are human beings. ""Communism doomed,"" he tells us, ""not because it is morally wrong but because it cannot ithstand conceptual changes"". He is a libertarian socialist, if one must label him, but one who believes that public ownership is not a magic cure for all of society's ills. American liberals should sit up and take notice: such defiant, hard-headed humanism has not appeared on the British--or any other--""Left"" since George Orwell.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St Martin's Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963

Categories: NONFICTION