Interpretation of the New Left raises a number of tricky historical and hermeneutical issues for the contemporary commentator. This current has always challenged conventional demarcations between intellectual matters and political life, and has experimented with different kinds of theoretical argument and political project. Accordingly, the New Left does not fit easily into the categories and disciplinary boundaries of the modern academy. Understanding both its history and ‘meaning’ are thus relatively complex exercises in which different levels of intellectual argument and political action need to be addressed.

Such difficulties are particularly marked when we consider the early years of the New Left in Britain, from 1956 to the early 1960s, when an unusual kind of political ‘movement’ came into being. Whilst the history of the New Left in these years is often referred to in passing, it has not, on the whole, been properly analyzed. Most interpreters have chosen to present the story of these years in terms of the choices and mistakes of key ‘actors’, though others—including myself—have tried to incorporate wider structural factors which shaped the nature and prospects of this ‘movement’.footnote1 Evaluating the worth and significance of the ideas developed in the different New Left milieux is also far from straightforward, given the eclecticism and subsequent impact of many of the concerns which were aired at this time. And, finally, there is the difficulty of excavating the recent history of a number of prominent intellectuals and activists in a period about which many are still sensitive. Some former participants remain understandably ‘territorial’ about this part of their political and intellectual lives.

These real interpretative problems, in some ways peculiar to the New Left phenomenon, have elicited very different methodological responses in the spate of recent commentary on the British movement, though they have rarely been explicitly addressed.footnote2 Any sense of them is absent from, for instance, Dorothy Thompson’s discussion of the books about the British New Left by Lin Chun and myself.footnote3 The tenor of Thompson’s contribution is clear from the outset, encapsulated in the disdainful observation with which she begins her piece: ‘The politics of the non-aligned Left of the years 1956–1962 have become fashionable of late.’ Most of her remarks about my own book suggest a rather hurried reading and rely heavily upon caricature; but in essence our differences come down to methodology and problems of interpretation. Rather than opting for the point-by-point refutation with which miffed authors traditionally reply to their critics, I want to correct her principal misinterpretation of the book’s rationale, and offer some brief comments on the interpretative problems outlined above, in the context of my assessment of the intellectual contribution of the early New Left. My book is not, and does not claim to be, a complete historical account of the different milieux within this ‘movement’. It is a study of the ideas produced by some of the early New Left’s leading thinkers in different spheres, and contains a brief narrative account of the New Left as a ‘movement’ between 1956 and 1964.footnote4 Like her, I await a published account of the history of the New Left as a ‘movement’, but find it strange that she should mistake my book for an attempt to provide one.