This introduction to Part II explains why the WCC shifted toward a “liberationist” human rights agenda in the late 1960s and 1970s. One key factor was Cold War détente, which opened up space for criticism of the Cold War deadlock and the superpower interventionism it supposedly justified. Another was decolonization, which contributed to a global reconfiguration of Christianity. These enabled the rise of the New Left, which favored grassroots activism over bureaucratic structures and projected hopes for political renewal onto the Third World. While often overlooked because of the simultaneous process of secularization, especially in Western Europe, religion played an important role in the ferment of the 1960s. Liberation theology, emanating above all from Latin America, inspired much of the WCC’s new agenda, which was defined by its overtly political positioning against liberalism and alignment with socialism and especially anti-imperialism. The WCC’s course contrasted with the liberal rights agenda of Amnesty, the statist agenda espoused by postcolonial leaders promoting a New International Economic Order, and the anticommunism of more conservative actors, like US evangelicals.

The Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) was the most important institution for the identification and nurturing of a community of radical economists. The Union for Radical Political Economics was founded in September 1968 at Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, by junior faculty members and graduate students. The immediate circumstances of the founding of URPE were closely related to the anti-Vietnam War movement and to a nationally divisive event. In August 1968, Chicago police violently charged against demonstrators at the Democratic Party Convention. The aftershocks of the police riot were felt in economics through a boycott of the city by some of the rank and file. On its first anniversary, URPE had swelled in members and in ambition. At the next annual convention of the American Economic Association, radicals read a list of grievances charging their peers as sycophants of inequality, alienation, destruction of the environment, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy, and in so doing choosing for themselves an oppositional attitude toward their colleagues, their values, and practices.

Founded at Ann Arbor, the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) was an offspring of the Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and of the politicization of university students inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s.The adjective radical in radical economics indicates a vocation to orient one’s professional life to progressive social change. To cast a light on the origins of this vocation the chapter reads the Port Huron Statement against the backdrop of debates in social science, notably the “end of ideology” debate, against Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and the Free University movement that followed it. The radical economists at the University of Michigan were institutional entrepreneurs, having helped to grow SDS to national eminence, they were directly involved in the creation of SDS’s Radical Education Project and the New University Conference. Both of these organizations represented a commitment to intellectual tasks at a time when SDS leadership became a fierce advocate for direct and violent action.

Appeals to “community” and to “the common” have become increasingly frequent in political thought. In this chapter, I focus on some of the reasons for the appearance of such appeals in the landscape of contemporary political thought. This chapter also highlights some of the uncanny intellectual links across the entire political spectrum, from European post-Marxist and American communitarian philosophers to the public intellectuals of the neofascist “New Right.” These links emerge and play out in a broader intellectual field that is shaped both by the political economy of Western Europe and North America after 1945 and by the failure to address the obvious shortcomings and negative effects of this political economy. Against this broader background, current appeals to community in political thought can be seen as a response to the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism, which has led to a legitimation crisis of liberal constitutional democracy. But I am also going to suggest that appeals to community invariably tend to drift into an antidemocratic direction.

Ginsberg was not just a primary figure in the literary and countercultural movements of the decades following World War II. As this chapter details, he also provides a crucial link, too infrequently acknowledged, between these postwar movements and the Old Left ideals and communities of the 1930s and early 1940s. Touching on the numerous moments in Ginsberg’s poetry and biography where he recalls a youth shaped by his parents’ communist and socialist commitments, including their support for labor unions, this essay explains briefly why those commitments needed to be reformulated as Ginsberg began his poetic career in the mid 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War.

This chapter explores the debate about the post-1890s expansion of the United States. Taking as a starting point the creation of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in the 1960s, the chapter suggests that the Left has shaped our field’s discourse since that transformative decade. What constitutes and orients this intellectual movement has, however, changed over time: from the New Left, to the Cultural Left, to the Millennial Left. None of these three organic traditions regarded itself as a rigid School of Thought. Nevertheless, these three manifestations denaturalized, in turn, capitalism, nationalism, and liberalism by presenting each “-ism” as a synonym for US imperial power. Collectively, these three Left Turns have inspired field-defining debates about military power, free trade, cultural hegemony, and legal exception. The discussions have shaped the questions, methodologies, and interpretive tendencies of US foreign relations history. Rather than judging the cumulative effects of this six-decade debate, this chapter illuminates its often unappreciated genealogy. Hopefully, thinking historically about the historiography of US foreign relations history can suggest generative vistas for the future.

This chapter examines the emergence of the Chile solidarity movement, a broad umbrella of Latin American exiles, West German New Leftists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and orthodox Communists united by the idea that the Pinochet regime was fascist that required their opposition given Germany’s fascist past. The chapter explains why these leftists employed a human rights rhetoric that leftists had largely shunned in the 1960s. It argues that from 1973 to 1976 there was a widespread consensus among solidarity activists that the demand for human rights and expressing solidarity with Chile’s socialist experiment under Allende were compatible claims. Human rights became part of a common strategy to secure the international isolation of the Chilean military regime. These “politics of emergency” enabled the close collaboration between leftists and Amnesty International. These “politics of emergency” were controversial, but the Chile solidarity movement was forced to adopt them to help the Chilean left survive. The chapter concludes by showing how this consensus weakened after 1976 because Maoists rejected the endless continuation of the politics of emergency.

By the mid-twentieth century, for those on the political Left, America had spawned a purely competitive, morally and spiritually debased, money-oriented culture. Inspiring a diverse range of responses, this American culture of money was a central ideological target of 1960s-era activism, alongside interrelated concerns with industrialization, the nuclear threat, the Vietnam War and American interventionism abroad, racism, and environmental degradation. Some counterculture groups adopted explicitly anti-money doctrines and actively sought to build functioning communities outside of the money economy; for others, poverty was associated with spiritual plenitude, or was a secondary symptom of a desire to be free of all responsibilities and entanglements; still others critiqued capitalism’s role in structural oppression. This chapter explores the diversity of such responses, as illustrated in political and literary works of the period, and registers the extent to which countercultural criticism of the culture of money was not without its compromises, inconsistencies, and (apparent) hypocrisies.

Kerouac’s On the Road had a profound impact on the 1960s’ counterculture. This chapter shows how the ethos of On the Road joined with the ethos of the rock movement that was ushered in shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 by the appearance of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. In addition, the psychedelic rock movement, also inspired by The Beatles, and led by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, pointed to Kerouac’s On the Road as a clarion call of the 1960s’ countercultural zeitgeist. With unprecedented influence over the youth culture of their times, such rock artists as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison of The Doors, among others pointed to On the Road as a seminal influence on their lives and art. Furthermore, the political wing of the counterculture, including Abbie Hoffman, also viewed On the Road as an inspiring text. This chapter explores the impact of On the Road on the counterculture, despite the novel’s often conservative message, and views it as a bookend to the 1960s’ counterculture.

This chapter outlines how the 1970s brought radical expression, new explorations of poetic persona, and increasing belief in the poet’s role to advocate for rights and freedoms. It argues that anthologies seeking to capture the zeitgeist failed to do so, sometimes due to using frameworks borrowed from North America that elided local diversity. The chapter asserts that small press culture constituted a provisional, heterogeneous commons that undid traditional definitions of authorship and form, and offered a space to air the previously taboo. It traces the turn to America as well as to popular culture, other media, and documentary. Through an examination of Michael Dransfield’s reception, it demonstrates how umbrella terms delimit complex individual poetics while demonstrating affiliations in Dransfield’s self-examination with contemporaries like Pam Brown, Nigel Roberts, and Vicki Viidkikas. The chapter also considers the impact of the first anthology of women’s poetry, Mother, I’m Rooted. It redresses the elision of its editor, Kate Jennings, from other anthologies and critical framings of the period, as well as the marginalisation of Kevin Gilbert.

Chapter 7 focuses on the 1970s, when anti-colonial movements sought to turn global hierarchies upside down. Their efforts moved from the US civil rights movement to expose the racism and sexism embedded in professional work, as in education, social work, and medicine. Teachers observed their ‘hidden curriculum’, which excluded those they long claimed to help. Lawyers noted their close alliance to capital and sought, for the less-powerful, alternative routes to legal service. Engineers, who up to this point claimed that they had literally built civilization, began to ask whether they had in fact condemned society to live in concrete boxes and breathe polluted air. Even accountants were not immune. The high and fluctuating inflation that characterized the end of the moral-economic order established after the Second World War produced a legitimation crisis that required, in Britain, a Royal Commission on something as fundamental to capitalism as the calculation of profit.

In North Korea, Latin American leftist intellectuals and political leaders were forced to come to grips with an extravagant personality cult centred around Kim Il Sung. Part of what made the North Korean model of socialism palatable to some in the 1960s, is that the Cuban Revolution had given new credence to the concept of the “maximum leader.” The New Left often romanticized charismatic leaders from the global South like Fidel, Kim, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, even while being critical of the autocracy they perceived in the Soviet Union. Admirers of North Korea’s political system argued it reflected the needs of a society in rapid transition from colonial-feudal backwardness to socialist modernity, and that ideas such as “freedom” were subjective and culturally determined. Such narratives of historical and cultural relativism were, ironically, also common among those critical of the North Korean model. This chapter looks at the different ways the North Korean political system could be interpreted within the Latin American Left, with examples from the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Chile.

Despite coordinated international protest, the United States continued to increase its involvement in Vietnam. The escalating war, an increasingly militant global political landscape, and a new conception of anti-imperialist struggle pushed thousands of radicals to escalate their activism beyond the ideological terrain. Black radicals in the United States argued that the best way to support national liberation struggles was to wage war inside the “belly of the beast.” Latin American revolutions like Che Guevara exhorted radicals across the globe to create “two, three, many Vietnams.” And Vietnamese revolutionaries publicly welcomed this sharp radicalization of antiwar engagement. Frustrated with the limits of earlier activism, radicals in France leapt at the opportunity. Coordinating with other anti-imperialists in the North Atlantic, they tried to translate the Vietnamese struggle into their own particular contexts, and their efforts eventually lit the fuse that set off the explosive events of May 1968. In this way, the Vietnam War made May ’68 possible. May itself, radicals thought, was nothing other than another front in the revolutionary wave led by Vietnam. And just as Vietnamese revolutionaries inspired the French, the events of May ’68 inspired radicals elsewhere, who in turn tried to translate May ’68 into their own political vernacular. By the end of the year, thousands of radicals across North America and Western Europe believed it was their internationalist duty to make war at home.

Chapter 2 reviews the hippie movement’s history and ideology. Using the flower children metaphor often used to describe the hippies, the review relates to four periods labeled as seeding (1945–1964), sprouting (1965–1966), growing (1967–1969), and blossoming and withering (1970–1973). The hippie ideology is described according to five dominant ethics: dope, sex, rock, community, and cultural opposition. This chapter also summarizes the literature exploring where all the hippies went and what legacy they contributed to the world.

The chapter positions the revolutionary African theorist Amílcar Cabral as part of a Tricontinental generation that believed coordinated, parallel liberation struggles would erase inequalities between Global North and South. A dedicated nationalist, he viewed socialism as a toolkit for evaluating and challenging the international system. His party, the African Party for the Independence of Guiné and Cabo Verde (PAIGC), combined armed revolt and social reconstruction in an attempt to erase the economic inequalities and racism central to Euro-American imperialism. As the PAIGC became enmeshed in diverse solidarity networks that sustained its war, Cabral refined his ideology to better explain his party’s position at the intersection of Third World anti-imperial traditions, international socialism, and Pan-Africanism. Identarian and ideological frictions hampered the movement, but PAIGC philosophy legitimized the creation of an inclusive revolutionary coalition and proved effective at building solidarity in North and South. As a result, Cabral became a leading political theorist of revolution and anti-imperialism, placing him in the foundational canon of the Tricontinental movement.