Norman Birnbaum

Albert Salomon (1891-1966), deutsch-jüdischer Soziologe und Herausgeber der Zeitschrift "Die Gesellschaft", war nach seiner Emigration 1935 Professor an der New School for Social Research in New York, wo er in alteuropäischer Tradition eine humanistische Soziologie begründete. Diese fünfbändige textkritische Edition ist die erste Ausgabe seiner gesammelten Werke.

This book is a contribution to the history of the Cold War, Dr. Birnbaum having been a very audible critic of US policy. Even more, it is a study of the role of ideas in politics, and of the adventures and misadventures of three generations of public intellectuals in Europe and the US. The author, now the senior member of the Editorial Board of The Nation, was a founding editor of New Left Review, a member of the Editorial Board of Partisan Review, and a contributor to Trans-Atlantic debate. He is particularly proud of having been barred from the German Democratic Republic in 1986 for assisting some of the dissidents who eventually ended the regime. Dr. Birnbaum's direct experience of public affairs includes an appointment as Consultant, National Security Council, and advisory roles with the United Auto Workers and Senator Edward Kennedy. He has also been an advisor to the German Trade Union Federation and the Green and Social Democratic Parties, to the French Socialist Party and Spanish Socialist Party, and to the Secretariat for Non-Believers of the Holy See. The text includes portraits of Harvard contemporaries (McGeorge Bundy, Carl Kaysen, Henry Kissinger, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) as well as of a spectrum of Europeans, including Willy Brandt. Isaiah Berlin, Clement Greenberg, Leszek Kolakowski, Henri Lefebvre, Dwight Macdonald, Herbert Marcuse, Iris Murdoch, William Phillips are equally remembered." With his unique mixture of acute analysis, sardonic humor and human judgments, the author enabled me to re-imagine the tumultuous years of our recent past. His picture of Germany and his personal account of New York intellectual life are especially intriguing. This is a good volume to peruse in our present period of political ineptitude and tone-deafness." --Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor of Divinity Emeritus, Harvard University, author, The Future of Faith and The Market as God, Harvard University Press, 2016." An astonishing memoir. Here is the political and intellectual life of American and Europe over more than sixty years, a kaleidoscope of connections, comrades and correspondence, all linked by the Ariadne's thread of Norman's life." --James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, LBJ School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin." This memoir is a testament to American exceptionalism. There has been no public American intellectual like Norman Birnbaum, no one who has taught, done research, and entered public struggles in every major European country while also connecting with oppositional groups in New York and Washington D. C. Nor has anyone else, with wit and interpretive focus, connected such a panoply of experience with the major currents of the last half of the Twentieth Century." --Robert Jay Lifton, psychiatrist and author, winner of the National Book Award for Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books 2000)." Without peer, Norman Birnbaum has educated generations of Americans about the politics of Europe, just as he has illuminated scholars, political thinkers and statesmen of Europe about the United States and world politics in general." --Marcus Raskin, Distinguished Fellow and co-founder, Institute for Policy Studies." At ninety-one, the author is true to himself: a thinker at home on both sides of the Atlantic. He provides us with unique and vivid sketches of the movements and persons he has influenced. His vocation as a teacher who takes the world as a classroom is a gift across the generations: he influences us still." --Gerhard SchrOder, Former Chancellor, the Federal German Republic.

This book is a contribution to the history of the Cold War, Dr. Birnbaum having been a very audible critic of US policy. Even more, it is a study of the role of ideas in politics, and of the adventures and misadventures of three generations of public intellectuals in Europe and the US. The author, now the senior member of the Editorial Board of The Nation, was a founding editor of New Left Review, a member of the Editorial Board of Partisan Review, and a contributor to Trans-Atlantic debate. He is particularly proud of having been barred from the German Democratic Republic in 1986 for assisting some of the dissidents who eventually ended the regime. Dr. Birnbaum's direct experience of public affairs includes an appointment as Consultant, National Security Council, and advisory roles with the United Auto Workers and Senator Edward Kennedy. He has also been an advisor to the German Trade Union Federation and the Green and Social Democratic Parties, to the French Socialist Party and Spanish Socialist Party, and to the Secretariat for Non-Believers of the Holy See. The text includes portraits of Harvard contemporaries (McGeorge Bundy, Carl Kaysen, Henry Kissinger, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) as well as of a spectrum of Europeans, including Willy Brandt. Isaiah Berlin, Clement Greenberg, Leszek Kolakowski, Henri Lefebvre, Dwight Macdonald, Herbert Marcuse, Iris Murdoch, William Phillips are equally remembered.

The twentieth century witnessed a profound shift in both socialism and social reform. In the early 1900s, social reform seemed to offer a veritable religion of redemption, but by the century's end, while socialism remained a vibrant force in European society, a culture of extreme individualism and consumption all but squeezed the welfare state out of existence. Documenting this historic change, After Progress: European Socialism and American Social Reform in the 20th Century is the first truly comprehensive look at the course of social reform and Western politics after Communism, brilliantly explained by a major social thinker of our time. Norman Birnbaum traces in fascinating detail the forces that have shifted social concern over the course of a century, from the devastation of two world wars, to the post-war golden age of economic growth and democracy, to the ever-increasing dominance of the market. He makes sense of the historical trends that have created a climate in which politicians proclaim the arrival of a new historical epoch but rarely offer solutions to social problems that get beyond cost-benefit analyses. Birnbaum goes one step further and proposes a strategy for bringing the market back into balance with the social needs of the people. He advocates a reconsideration of the notion of work, urges that market forces be brought under political control, and stresses the need for education that teaches the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Both a sweeping historical survey and a sharp-edged commentary on current political posturing, After Progress examines the state of social reform past, present and future.

Norman Birnbaum is one of the most influential social critics in contemporary America. These essays, selected from his writings of the past twenty years, show the recent evolution and transformation of Marxist thought into the current `post-Marxist' age.

Toward A Critiacal Sociology