Raymond Aron: The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955/1962)

First published in 1955, this political reflection seeks to show how noble ideas can slide into the “tyranny of secular religion”. It stresses how political thought has the responsibility of telling the truth about social and political reality – in all its imperfections and complexities.

Aron explodes the three “myths” of radical thought: the Left, the Revolution, and the Proletariat. Each of these ideas, Aron shows, are ideological, mystifying rather than illuminating. He also provides a fascinating sociology of intellectual life and a powerful critique of historical determinism in the classically restrained prose for which he is justly famous.

First published in French L’Opium des intellectuels, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1955
First published in 1955
Translated by Terence Kilmartin
Foreword translated by Lucile H. Brockway
Publisher W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1962
324 pages

Review (Rudolf Allers)

Wikipedia (in French)

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Martin Duberman: Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left (2012)

“Howard Zinn was perhaps the best-known and most widely celebrated popular interpreter of American history in the twentieth century, renowned as a bestselling author, a political activist, a lecturer, and one of America’s most recognizable and admired progressive voices.

His rich, complicated, and fascinating life placed Zinn at the heart of the signal events of modern American history—from the battlefields of World War II to the McCarthy era, the civil rights and the antiwar movements, and beyond. A bombardier who later renounced war, a son of working-class parents who earned a doctorate at Columbia, a white professor who taught at the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, a committed scholar who will be forever remembered as a devoted “people’s historian,” Howard Zinn blazed a bold, iconoclastic path through the turbulent second half of the twentieth century.

For the millions who were moved by Zinn’s personal example of political engagement and by his inspiring “bottom up” history, here is an authoritative biography of this towering figure—by Martin Duberman, recipient of the American Historical Association’s 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award. Given exclusive access to the previously closed Zinn archives, Duberman’s impeccably researched biography is illustrated with never-before-published photos from the Zinn family collection. Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left is a major publishing event that brings to life one of the most inspiring figures of our time.”

Publisher The New Press, 2012
ISBN 1595586784, 9781595586780
365 pages

Review (Michael Kammen, Los Angeles Review of Books)
Review (David Greenberg, New Republic)

Publisher

EPUB

Rebecca Solnit: Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000)

“Drawing together many histories — of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores — Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction — from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton’s Nadja — finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.”

Publisher Penguin, 2000
ISBN 0670882097, 9780670882090
326 pages

Reviews: Andrew O’Hehir (Salon), Joseph Anthony Amato (Journal of Social History).

EPUB