Please join the Rutgers Center for European Studies for a lecture by
Sophie Scott-Brown
(Univ. of St. Andrews/NYU Remarque)
"Utopian Anti-Utopianism: British Activist-Intellectuals and the Unexpectedly Radical 1950s"
5:30 PM, Wed., Oct. 30th, AB 6051 CAC
We think of the fifties as apathetic, conformist, and conservative. It was, but precisely because of these factors, not in spite of them, it also fostered more radical thinking than usually recognised. As traditional identities fractured and new ones emerged, the activist-intellectuals clustered around the first British New Left, the Freedom Press anarchists, and the Direct Action Committee for peace asked what it was to be free in a nuclear age of affluence and scepticism. From the wreckage of ideologies, they came to see the practice of democracy, not the theory of it, as the truest expression of freedom. But now they faced another question: can plurality bring about plurality? In other words, can treating people as if they are already equal political agents liberate them, or does it merely paralyse the prospects for meaningful change in the future?
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