Gregory Claeys

Early Socialism as Intellectual History

Summary This article examines approaches to early socialism from an intellectual history viewpoint, focussing on British Owenite socialism. It assesses the authors own research in the field over the past thirty-five years in an effort to measure the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches he initially adopted to the field. It attempts to balance insights associated with the so-called “Cambridge School” with those gained in particular from the standpoints of the history of religion and the history of emotions, and a theory of group identity which can in part be associated with the history of utopianism

Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There

Whites?’ (xvi) According to Itagaki, in a post-civil rights, post-industrial and post-Cold War America, where intensely segregated and discriminatory conditions have awkwardly persisted alongside claims that society is ‘post-racial’, the politics of ‘racial civility’ have most often been deployed by whites – both liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats – to defuse, redirect, diminish, denigrate, ignore or exclude altogether legitimate racial critique and protest. She calls this attempt to use the politics of civility to blunt racial grievance ‘civil racism’. Organized around the rhetoric of ‘race neutrality’, ‘colorblindness’ and ‘equal treatment’, civil racism represents a retreat from the promises and commitments of the civil rights era into a neoliberal framework of individual rights. Itagaki explores these themes by looking at a series of ‘cultural eruptions’ (novels, documentary films and a theatrical production) that were created after the 1992 racial disturbance in LA. She uses these works to explore how different people crafted narratives to explain what happened there. In the process, these artists also revealed some of the conflicted expectations and biases around race, class and gender in modern America. According to Itagaki, the ‘writers, playwrights, and filmmakers’ in the book ‘challenge popular representations of the unprecedented interracial violence in their attempts to imagine new ways of achieving a more just world built from the ashes of Los Angeles’ (33). They ‘self-consciously experimented with their art and challenged their audiences’ expectations in order to transform the way we think about racism, inequality, and justice’ (xvii). Civil Racism is broken into two major sections. The first half of the book focuses on discreet groups – Korean-Americans, African Americans and Latinos – and the way ‘racial civility’ is promoted within societal institutions, like the family, schools or the neighbourhood. In the second half of the book, Itagaki focuses on two texts that she argues adopt a ‘multicultural perspective’ and challenge ‘manifestations of civil racism’ by establishing a ‘counter-discourse of civility’ (29). Itagaki uses the epilogue to suggest some of the ways contemporary #BlackLivesMatter activists have continued to marshal ‘counter-discourses of civility’ against civil racism. The book is filled with a number of interesting insights about the intersections of race and civility in the recent past and, I suspect, will appeal to scholarly readers to the degree that they appreciate literary and cultural analysis over traditional historical analysis. For me, the most important and intellectually significant portion of the book is the introduction, which provides a lengthy discussion and critique of the politics of race and civility, broadly. Here, Itagaki offers a lucid and very helpful explication of the politics of civility in the post-civil rights era, as well as a strong racial critique.