Sarjeant, Christopher; (2025) Dissent magazine and the intra-left culture wars of the American long-1990s. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The last decade and a half of the twentieth century, together with the first few years of the twenty-first, was a period of rigorous and often rancorous debate within the American left. Faced with large-scale structural changes in the global economy and the impact of influential new theoretical practices and epistemological approaches at home, the left would do battle with itself over everything from the influence of postmodernism and a new highly confrontational form of identity politics, to the ongoing valence of, ‘class’, and the proper response to humanitarian crises abroad. Whilst much scholarship has been trained on those on the radical side of these debates, this study focuses instead on a small group of core writers, journalists and academics at the left-leaning journal Dissent, a group normally associated with the somewhat amorphous category of left-liberalism but one examined here through the specific lens of ‘social democracy’. Through close textual analysis and oral history methods, the study explores not just the central components of the group’s social democratic worldview, but also its origins in both late-twentiethcentury Jewish liberal thought and a version of East Coast metropolitan civic republicanism derived from the group’s strong historical bond with the political traditions of New York City. Ultimately, the study concludes that the group’s commitment to social democracy was a genuine one, even as some members of the group drifted towards a more expansive liberal vision themselves in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11.

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