Word: lynde
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...Left-comprising what Bayard Rustin calls the "disaffected sons and daughters of the middle class"-has found a curiously appropriate leader in Staughton Lynd. He is the Brooks Brothers man as revolutionary. Harvard graduate, former assistant professor at Yale, he is the son of Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, authors of Middletown and Middletown in Transition, both classic sociological studies of a small city in the 1920s and 1930s. Staughton, now 38, is best known as editor of the book Nonviolence in Amer ica and as a confirmed peace marcher and self-appointed citizen-envoy to North Viet...
Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism is a kind of historical guide and handbook for the gentleman rebel -Emerson-cum-Marx rather than Rap Brown-cum-Mao. "I am less interested in 18th century radicalism than in 20th century radicalism," Lynd admits, and at times he makes American history read like one long protest march in which Jefferson, Thoreau and Staughton Lynd are fraternity brothers linked arm in arm. Lynd writes as a scholar as well as a proselyter, and his slim volume valuably documents the American tradition of dissent. But it must be read with the proper skepticism...
Snake in Eden. Like a film running in reverse, Lynd's version of American history reels backward from the New Left to the Declaration of Independence -"the single most concentrated expression of the revolutionary intellectual tradition." Yet even in the beginning, Lynd observes critically, there was a snake in Eden. "Property, property! That is the difficulty!" cried John Adams upon rereading Rousseau's The Social Contract in the White House. "It was indeed," Lynd echoes. Even the radicals of 1776, he laments, believed that the best way to support individual freedom was by guaranteeing the rights of "property...
...Lynd, the history of American radicalism has been a series of accelerating "guerrilla attacks upon the right of property." A Quaker as well as a Marxist, he is at his most original in suggesting that members of Nonconformist English sects-many from the Society of Friends, as were William Penn and Thomas Paine-were the first of the guerrillas. In the latter part of the 18th century, these Dissenters argued that the only "absolute and inalienable" rights were human rights, not property rights. Bringing theology and politics into coincidence, they established conscience-the "inner light"-as the divine right...
Final Spiral. In Lynd's quick march, the next main engagement that had to be fought by the American radical was to establish "a freedom to act as well as think and speak." History, he believes, provided the appropriate issue in abolitionism, which expanded the private privilege of conscience into the public privilege of civil disobedience. The radicals of 1776 stipulated that "only majorities could renew the social contract," explains Lynd. "Abolitionism was obliged to discard that restriction so as to justify individual disobedience to laws which sanctioned slavery...