The Other Michael Harrington: From Orthodoxy to Dialectics and a Realistic US Radicalism

• Published in: Critique (Glasgow) 2007-12, Vol.35 (3), p.391-411
• Main Author: Gorman, Robert A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Democratic socialism; Dialectics; Marxism; Political economy; Poverty; The Other America
• ISSN: 0301-7605; 1748-8605
• DOI: 10.1080/03017600701676811

This article traces Michael Harrington's intellectual pilgrimage from economism to dialectics, primarily by examining pertinent writings beginning with The Other America in 1962. This popular work, which generated a bevy of anti-poverty reforms during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, assumed that attacking poverty directly would ignite a broad-based US socialist movement. Eventually, Harrington realized that the political economy of globalizing capitalism had unexpectedly transformed meliorative public programs into tools of capital accumulation that adversely affected both workers and professionals. Moreover, victims were looking to the political right, not the left, for help. During the 1970s and 1980s Harrington realized that The Other America had peddled Old Left socialism dressed in New Deal reformism; he trashed the Old and New Lefts; he highlighted links connecting economics and culture; and he discovered the seminal importance of what scholars had called American Exceptionalism. The 'other' Michael Harrington refers to what was insensitive and reductionist in Harrington's early socialism. Alienated from angry New Leftists and disillusioned with Old Left colleagues, Harrington retooled intellectually and redefined democratic socialism. Socialist politics, says an aging Harrington, can succeed only as part of a large strategy that patriotically reclaims America's individualist, democratic, and egalitarian heritage. He calls this Socialist Republicanism.