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Radical Democracy
By C. Douglas Lummis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ix + 185 pages
C. Douglas Lummis was at the University of California at Berkeley during the heady days of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, studying political theory.
There was nothing in political science to match studying political theory at Berkeley in the 1960s. Except for Mulford Sibley, sitting in splendid isolation in Minnesota, Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar were the major voices of critical dissent in the field from the left, promoting a radical civicism composed of a democratic reading of the ancient Greeks, American pragmatic democratic socialism, and a modernism embodying an agonic tension between an Enlightenment commitment to reason as the ultimate judge and a genuine appreciation of the critiques of rationalism issued by Freud, Nietzsche, and Weber. Wolin's Politics and Vision (1960) was to young left political theorists of the time what C. Wright Mills' Sociological Imagination was to young sociologists, their positive link with an older generation, ensuring that rebellion would not lead to total generational war.
The young, even in a competitive society, want a positive link with at least some elders: they know they need to learn, but they also want to learn what they need. What could be more exciting for a student of political theory than to witness and participate in a radical democratic social movement while simultaneously imbibing hyper-sophisticated critical democratic theory from masters of the craft? The Berkeley modernists, like their New York public-intellectual counterparts, epitomized by Irving Howe, believed that one could and should be a social democrat without sacrificing the critical and intellectual achievements of elite culture: one could have Eliot and Marx, Plato and radical Dewey.
The crossing of Berkeley political theory and the Free Speech Movement created a highly favorable conjuncture for intellectual ferment and creativity: theory and practice were in tight dialogue, challenging the young theorist to try to work through the tension between cultural elitism and a concretely emerging participatory democracy that their teachers had not had to confront. The works of James Glass, Larry Spence, and Jack Wikse are emblematic of the creative scholarship produced by the Berkeley theorists.
Lummis comes late to the game, only now distilling his thoughts on the issues raised by...