American Democratic Socialism

A sweeping, ambitious history of American democratic socialism from one of the world’s leading intellectual historians and social ethicists “The movement whose tangled history Gary Dorrien tells in American Democratic Socialism has deep roots in the very ‘American’ values it is accused of undermining. . . . The version of the socialist left that emerges is one that deserves more attention.”—Hari Kunzru, New York Review of Books Democratic socialism is ascending in the United States as a consequence of a widespread recognition that global capitalism works only for a minority and is harming the planet’s ecology. This history of American democratic socialism from its beginning to the present day interprets the efforts of American socialists to address and transform multiple intersecting sites of injustice and harm. Comprehensive, deeply researched, and highly original, this book offers a luminous synthesis of secular and religious socialisms, detailing both their intellectual and their organizational histories.

A sweeping, ambitious history of American democratic socialism from one of the world’s leading intellectual historians and social ethicists “The movement whose tangled history Gary Dorrien tells in American Democratic Socialism has deep roots in the very ‘American’ values it is accused of undermining. . . . The version of the socialist left that emerges is one that deserves more attention.”—Hari Kunzru, New York Review of Books Democratic socialism is ascending in the United States as a consequence of a widespread recognition that global capitalism works only for a minority and is harming the planet’s ecology. This history of American democratic socialism from its beginning to the present day interprets the efforts of American socialists to address and transform multiple intersecting sites of injustice and harm. Comprehensive, deeply researched, and highly original, this book offers a luminous synthesis of secular and religious socialisms, detailing both their intellectual and their organizational histories.