Radical Society: A Review of Culture and Politics was a quarterlyleft-wing political and culturalmagazine published in theUnited States by Radical Society, Ltd. Theeditor-in-chief was Timothy Don. It was established in 1970 asSocialist Revolution, was renamed asSocialist Review in 1978, and obtained its final title at the end of 2002.
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Socialist Revolution, under its founding editorJames Weinstein, began with a revolutionary perspective which was, however, very critical of the existingMarxist left (including theNew Communist Movement as well as established organizations), which it saw as undemocratic both in its way of operating and in its political aspirations. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the magazine was strongly associated with theNew American Movement (which in 1983 would merge with another organization to become theDemocratic Socialists of America) and its politics in this period developed in a similar direction towards a moreSocial Democratic perspective. In the course of this development the magazine was renamedSocialist Review in 1978, meanwhile absorbing the short-livedMarxist Perspectives.
Among the magazine's editors have been Eli Zaretsky, David Plotke, Jeffrey Escoffier, Leslie Kauffman, and David Trend.
Because the magazine had been founded in San Francisco with an editorial collective that included manyUniversity of California at Berkeley graduate students, it showed an openness to theory that was not universally shared by magazines on the left in the 1970s. As some of the original collective graduated and got teaching jobs in the Boston area, a second editorial collective was founded in nearbySomerville (and later a short-lived New York collective also came into existence for similar reasons). As the members of the Boston collective began to get tenure, the nature of the two main editorial collectives began to diverge, with the Boston Collective attracting junior faculty, while the Bay Area collective continued well into the 1980s to be composed primarily of graduate students and community activists. The Boston Collective was notable for the quality of its economic analysis, while the West Coast Collective was active in producing articles out of the variousidentity movements of the 1980s, always with an eye toward theory. During this period, a careful reader could tell exactly which collective was responsible for which articles in the magazine, but to most observers it meant thatSocialist Review reflected the diversity of positions available on the left.
Socialist Review came to be strongly associated withpostmoderncritical theory and evolved into a magazine with a strong cultural element. In 1991,Unfinished Business: 20 Years of Socialist Review, containing a collection of 20 articles was published.
In 2002 the magazine's name was changed again, toRadical Society: A Review of Culture and Politics. From 2002 to 2003 it was published byRoutledge. As of 2006[update], an independent publisher, Radical Society Ltd., took over publishing and relaunched its website, making a small selection of past issues available online.[1]
As of the end of 2006, theeditor-in-chief ofRadical Society was Timothy Don. The magazine has since ceased publication.
A substantial archive of Socialist Review's editorial correspondence, manuscripts, and records was acquired by the Paley Library ofTemple University in the 1990s. It is housed in the library's Contemporary Culture Collection.[2]
In the first issue orRadical Society, the editors wrote that the inspirations for the journal were "both old and new--fromThe Masses andEmma Goldman'sMother Earth to theHarlem Renaissance and theParis Commune, from the end of thecold war to the beginnings of a newglobal justice movement".[3]
