In the 1960s, theoretical quarrels over truth in the tradition of postwar political theory found themselves at the center of political conflict about the validity and value of student protest. This article traces those quarrels to argue that Herbert Marcuse was not merely a “guru” polemicist of the New Left, and that Jürgen Habermas’s emerging deliberative theory was not just the result of austere philosophical debates. Each self-consciously pursued justificatory links between their interpretations of Hegel, their debates on truth and justification, and their conflicting views on student protest. Both thinkers, I show, cited these theoretical debates in both public writing and private correspondence on the student movement. In the process, I suggest that prevailing histories of critical theory have underappreciated the ways these two divergent critical epistemologies were marshaled to justify different responses to student protest. More broadly, I argue that critical theory’s protest decade reanimates long-standing questions about the normative and political commitments latent in the twentieth century’s recurring debates about truth, language, and the objectivity of future possibilities.
In early 1946, working in the United Kingdom, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Bertrand Russell proposed a manifesto for a new League for the Rights of Man. Their intervention took place alongside the contemporaneous drafting, in the United States, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Eighty years later, the UDHR still stands as an enduring monument to the postwar human rights moment, while the 1946 manifesto for a new League for the Rights of Man is remembered only by a handful of scholars. 1 Why did one take off as spectacularly as the other failed? Although the standard explanations have pointed to the practical failures of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle, this article argues instead that a culture of abuse toward women tainted the drafting and dissemination process of the manifesto and disrupted a related petition to the British government. 2 The documentation of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle’s disregard of women’s rights—in theory and in practice—supports the feminist internationalist view, nascent in the 1940s and more vibrant over intervening decades, that human rights manifestos and organizations are unworkable without the integration of women and their rights. 3
Class contradiction and class struggle are the driving forces of history. When writing history, ignoring this point means committing an error of principle.
In 1910 anthropologist Franz Boas proposed ending racial strife by removing recognizable black identities from the American population via racial mixture. Wanting neither to offend a renowned ally nor to risk enflaming white hysteria over the mere specter of “amalgamation,” black Americans largely met Boas’s proposal with silence. Nevertheless, black views can be discerned through their responses to a similar proposal made the same year by a lesser-known anthropologist, John James Holm, as he solicited black endorsements. The ten black essayists within Holm’s book reveal a range of positions on racial mixture. Yet none endorsed Holm’s plan. Their responses suggest that Boas’s proposal and its disregard for legal wedlock would have garnered even less support. The indirect ways in which the black essayists made their views known on a controversial topic suggests a pathway for historians to restore black thought to a history in which they have been misrepresented and overlooked.
For the American Fourierist movement known as Associationism, the European revolutions of 1848 represented the opening scene of a new world-historical struggle: “the Emancipation of Labor.” The momentous example of the French Revolution in particular pushed this group of cooperative labor reformers, often dismissed as “utopians,” to embrace the politics and persuasiveness of working-class agitation as a tactical means to reorganize the system of industry. I argue that the Associationists—sidelined, when not forgotten, in the existing scholarship of “the American 1848”—should be appreciated for placing socialism on the agenda as the promise of a future workers’ democracy in the United States. Not only that, but they came to view the US labor movement itself as a participant in the social and political transformations of the 1848 revolutions. This is the Associationist 1848.
