The Origins of the British New Left

Abstract

The political development of the British New Left followed a somewhat unique trajectory in comparison with the broad international New Left of the late 1960s. It was in its early phase, from 1958 to 1962, that the group’s style and preoccupations most closely paralleled or, more accurately, anticipated key elements of late ’60s radicalism in its antibureaucratic—even anarchic— spirit, its participatory ethos, and its experimentation with direct action. This “movementist” phase was brief, its energies exhausted by 1962, and thereafter the New Left in Britain was a predominantly intellectual tendency without a unified political or activist agenda. Therefore, 1968 was not as defining a moment for the British New Left as it was in the United States, France, or Germany. This chapter focuses on the movementist phase of the British New Left as one of the earliest manifestations of an intellectual and activist New Left in Europe.