Against the grain

Young Lives on the Left is a unique social history of the individual lives of men and women who came of age in radical left circles in the 1960s. Based on a rich collection of oral history interviews, the book follows in-depth approximately twenty individuals, tracing the experience of activist self-making from child to adulthood. Their voices tell a particular story about the shaping of the English post-war self. Championing the oppressed in struggle, the young activists who developed the personal politics of the early 1970s grew up in a post-war society which offered an ever-increasing range of possibilities for constructing and experiencing the self. Yet, for many of these men and women the inadequacy of the social, political and cultural constructions available for social identity propelled their journeys on the left. The creation of new left spaces represented the quest for a construction of self that could accommodate the range of contradictions concerning class, gender, religion, race and sexuality that young activists experienced growing up in the post-war landscape.

An important contribution to the global histories of 1968, the book explores untold stories of English activist life, examining how political experiences, social attitudes and behaviour of this group of social actors (as teenagers, apprentices and undergraduates) were shaped in the changing social, educational and cultural landscape of post-war English society. The final chapters include attention to the social and emotional impact of Women’s Liberation on the left, as told from the perspective of women and men inside the early movement.

The book collects thirteen previously published essays by Keith Dowding on social and political power, freedom, choice and luck. It is anchored by a substantial introductory essay that pulls together the different strands to demonstrate the coherence and connections between the different concepts discussed through the book. The book demonstrates the importance of the concept of power to political science and argues that comparative static definitions enable comparison of power structures in terms of agents’ resources. It shows the importance of systematic luck in understanding the power structure. However, static definitions are inherently unsatisfactory in dynamic settings. Here we need to apply game theory rather than game forms, and in dynamic settings luck is vital to our perception of freedom, responsibility and leadership. Later chapters reveal the problematic evaluation of choice and freedom and how these relate to responsibility. The book concludes by demonstrating that freedom and rights exist in different senses, which matter for our understanding of how much freedom exists in a society. It shows that Sen’s liberal paradox is ambiguous between rights as claims and rights as liberties; how fundamental his paradox is to our understanding of the conflict between rights and welfare depends on the manner in which we evaluate freedom.

This book is about the language of the European Union’s response to the threat of terrorism: the ‘fight against terrorism’. Since its re-emergence in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the ‘fight against terrorism’ has come to represent a priority area of action for the European Union (EU). Drawing on interpretive approaches to International Relations, the author outlines a discourse theory of identity and counter-terrorism policy in order to explore the ways in which the EU’s counter-terrorism discourse has been constructed and the ways in which it functions. Importantly, the author shows how the ‘fight against terrorism’ structures the EU response to terrorism through the prism of identity, drawing our attention to the various ‘others’ that have come to form the target of EU counter-terrorism policy. Through an extensive analysis of the wider societal impact of the EU’s ‘fight against terrorism’ discourse, the author reveals the various ways in which EU counter-terrorism policy is contributing to the ‘securitisation’ of social and political life within Europe.