Politics (journal) - The Counterculture of Anarchist Humanism: Prologue To The 1960s

The Counterculture of Anarchist Humanism: Prologue To The 1960s

Macdonald's publishing in Politics of some of the earliest essays by the young Columbia-bound sociologist C. Wright Mills and the young novelist, playwright, therapist and New York social critic Paul Goodman helped seed their rise to national fame twenty years later as two of the signature theorists undergirding the New Left critique of postwar industrial society and mass culture. A debate between Mills and Goodman over the proper locus for the critique of repressive structures in America, with Mills taking a broadly Marxist frame in examining above-ground social structures, and Goodman preferring instead to excavate the post-Freudian unconscious and the repression of instinct, with the social psychology of Karen Horney and Erich Fromm for supporting witness, prefigured the sorts of polemics that would soon crowd the American quality-paperback tables from Ann Arbor to Yale amid the renewal of campus activism and new modes of scholarship. Other harbingers of future cultural ferment may be discerned in a long poem by the English anarcho-pacifist physician Alex Comfort (ascended for all time into the global non-literary firmament since 1972 thanks to The Joy of Sex), an essay by the young San Francisco Beat-affiliated poet Robert Duncan on the internalized repression, thence redirected outward, too often afflicting "The Homosexual in Society", and numerous essays by the Canadian-born London anarchist and conscientious objector George Woodcock, editor at the time of the anarchist cultural quarterly NOW, the raiding of the offices of whose publisher, Freedom Press, during the war by the political arm of the London police he chronicled in a letter to Politics in all its unavoidable irony:

"One of the houses raided was that of a surrealist not even directly connected with the anarchist movement. The day after the raid a Special Branch detective appeared to say that he had always been interested in surrealism, and would like to join the surrealist movement!"

And twenty years before his ideas on the "global village" made him a prophetic household name worldwide, the budding Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan weighed in as a contributor to Politics with a discussion of the problems of women in modern bureaucratic society.