Transnational political-intellectual formation, roughly 1956 to the late 1970s, that tried to reconstitute a radical Left in Western countries after the simultaneous collapse of confidence in the two existing options: the official communist parties tied to Moscow (discredited by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956) and the social-democratic parties of the Atlantic West (compromised, in many radicals' view, by Cold War anti-communism, imperial war, and the consumerist settlement of the postwar boom). The "New" Left defined itself against an Old Left — the Second International social democrats, the Third International communists, the orthodox labor movement — that it regarded as exhausted by bureaucracy, productivism, and acquiescence to empire. What it tried to put in the Old Left's place varied by country, but the characteristic ingredients were more or less the same: students, race, the Third World, culture, sexuality, and the long shadow of Auschwitz and the Gulag.
1956: the founding year
Two events in the autumn of 1956 broke the Left open. In October, Britain and France invaded Egypt over Suez — the last gasp of open imperial warfare by the Atlantic powers, and, for a generation of colonial subjects and metropolitan radicals, proof that "Western democracy" was not yet serious about decolonization. In November, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush a workers' council uprising, and communist parties across the West had to choose whether to endorse the intervention. Thousands of intellectuals left their national communist parties — in Britain, E.P. E.P. Thompson and John Saville among them; in France, Edgar Morin, Henri Lefebvre, Dionys Mascolo; in the United States, a slower bleed of CPUSA membership. The exits produced journals (Thompson's and Saville's The Reasoner; Stuart Stuart Hall's Universities and Left Review) which in 1960 merged into New Left Review — the point at which "New Left" became, at least in Britain, the settled name of the tendency.
The national formations
Britain: the most consciously New-Left self-description, built out of ex-CP historians (Thompson, Hobsbawm, Hilton, Hill, Saville) and the younger Oxford cohort (Hall, Raphael Samuel, Charles Taylor). Its signature achievement was cultural and historical: Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1963), Raymond Williams's The Long Revolution (1961), Hoggart's Uses of Literacy (1957), the Birmingham Cultural Studies tradition, and the journalistic and publishing work of New Left Review / Verso.
United States: C. Wright mills-cwright — whose Letter to the New Left (1960) gave the tendency its slogan — and, from 1962, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose Port Huron Statement (written mainly by Tom Hayden) articulated an ethic of "participatory democracy" against both Cold War liberalism and organizational communism. American New Left politics was inseparable from the Civil Rights Movement and, after 1965, from opposition to the Vietnam War; its most characteristic intellectual debt was to Herbert Herbert Marcuse, whose One-Dimensional Man (1964) became a movement classic and who, more than any other Frankfurt theorist, treated the student movement and the Third World as genuine revolutionary possibilities.
France: less a named "New Left" than a matrix of post-1956 dissident communists, Sartrean existentialists, situationists, and third-worldist radicals (influenced by Frantz Fanon and the Algerian War) who converged in May–June 1968, when a student revolt at Nanterre and the Sorbonne triggered a nine-million-strong general strike. The events of May '68 did not topple the Fifth Republic, but they permanently scrambled the relation between the French Communist Party, the trade unions, and the intellectual Left.
Germany: the Außerparlamentarische Opposition — extraparliamentary opposition — organized around the Socialist German Student League (SDS, no relation to the American group), the journals Kursbuch and Das Argument, and the shadow of Nazism that the postwar Federal Republic had conspicuously failed to work through. Rudi Dutschke was the best-known student leader; the assassination attempt on him in April 1968 was one of the movement's radicalizing moments. The Frankfurt School, whose younger generation (Habermas) was ambivalent and whose older generation (Adorno) was frightened, was the tradition they read.
Italy: the richest intellectual scene, with a mass Communist Party large enough to argue with. The operaismo (workerism) tradition — Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, later Antonio Negri — relocated revolutionary agency from the party to the factory floor and the mass worker; it fed into the autonomia movements of the 1970s and remains a live reference for parts of the contemporary Left.
What the New Left produced
A new political-intellectual canon: Gramsci, the young Marx, the Frankfurt School, Fanon, Mao, C. Wright Mills, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse.
A new set of objects: race and empire, student life, popular culture, patriarchy and the family, the unconscious, ecology.
A new set of institutions: research centres (the Birmingham CCCS), journals (New Left Review, Telos, Radical Philosophy, Dissent), small presses (Verso, Monthly Review, Pluto), the university humanities department as political-intellectual terrain.
The second-wave feminist movement, which broke out of the New Left partly because New Left men were patriarchal in theory-and-practice; the women's liberation movement from about 1968 defined itself both inside and against the broader New Left inheritance.
Decline and afterlife
By the mid-1970s the New Left as a self-conscious movement was fragmenting — exhausted by Vietnam's ambiguous end, by the drift of organized socialism into terrorism (the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, the Weather Underground), by the neoliberal turn of Atlantic politics after 1979, and by the rise of identity-based social movements that treated class as one axis among several rather than the organizing one. Its intellectual descendants are plural and sometimes at war: cultural studies and the academic humanities on one side; post-colonial and feminist theory on another; the revived interest in organized socialist politics (Corbyn, Sanders, the post-2008 left) on a third; Gabriel Rockhill's polemical communism on a fourth, treating much of the New Left's actual output as exactly the domesticated "Western Marxism" that needs to be refused. Whatever one thinks of those descendants, most of what passes for "the Left" in anglophone public life in the 2020s is genealogically traceable to the 1956–1968 opening.
See also
Western Marxism — the theoretical inheritance the New Left drew on and, later, was critiqued for having confused with politics