Todd Gitlin used to be a 1960s radical, an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) leader, a committed activist in the protests movements of the period. He became one of the tenured (former) radicals, a sociologist, professor of journalism, and active “public intellectual.” He is also author of books on the 1960s, the mass media, and cultural-political trends in present-day American society. Unlike many of his former colleagues, he distanced himself from his youthful radicalism and became critical of what he calls the “fundamentalist left.”

In this collection, as in other writings, he displays an excellent grasp of the adversarial mindset, noting, for example, that “anti-Americanism, was, and remains, a mood and a metaphysics more than a politics. It cannot help but see practical politics as an illusion entangled … with a system fatally flawed by original sin …...

 

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