Radical fifties : activist politics in cold war Britain /
The 1950s are usually portrayed as conservative, conformist, and apathetic, but was there more to this much-maligned decade than that? In Britain, the convergence of conflicting political moments - the Cold War, the Bomb, the rise of America, the decline of the empire, welfare, and affluence - compe...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, United States of America :
Oxford University Press,
[2025]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | The 1950s are usually portrayed as conservative, conformist, and apathetic, but was there more to this much-maligned decade than that? In Britain, the convergence of conflicting political moments - the Cold War, the Bomb, the rise of America, the decline of the empire, welfare, and affluence - compelled a rapid rethinking of what it meant to 'be political' along with a series of experiments in democracy and democracy education. 'The Radical Fifties' examines the distinctive 'activist politics' emerging from this by focusing on the entwined histories of its main protagonists: the Freedom Press anarchists, the New Left Club socialists, and the Direct Action Committee pacifists. Instead of gaining or influencing power in a traditional sense, these groups wanted to dispense with it all together and transform democracy into a whole way of life, a quality of interaction between people. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (unpaged) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780198915683 0198915683 0198915667 9780198915669 0198915675 9780198915676 |