The 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- 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.While this upturned conventional political thinking, it also posed a dilemma: conceding the practice of democracy a