Social History of the British New Left

• Grant number: 24/16424-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: July 01, 2025
• End date: June 30, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Carlos Jackson
• Grantee: Ugo Urbano Casares Rivetti
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research aims to analyse, in terms of a Sociology of intellectual life and resorting to a comparative approach, the groups that originated the British New Left: the communist intellectuals gathered around the New Reasoner and the Oxford students heading Universities and Left Review. In contrast to the dominant approach on the bibliography - focused, on the one hand, on these author's theses and, on the other, on their affiliation to a fairly distinct intellectual and political movement (the New Left itself) -, this research intends to examine this object through the reconstruction of theses agents' trajectories and the analysis of these groups' constitution and internal dynamic. Therefore, we are interested in setting those that were the members of the first formation of the British New Left as agents situated in certain positions, underpinned by certain itineraries and embedded in particular social relations. Accordingly, we intend not only to contribute to a better understanding of the trajectories of these agents, but also to disclose both the social conditions for the constitution of the New Left and the causes for the early dissolution of its first formation.