Toronto Book Launch: Radical Ambition The New Left in Toronto
Between the Lines presents the Toronto book launch of Radical Ambition The New Left in Toronto
Join authors Peter Graham and Ian McKay for a discussion about their latest book.
When: 5:00pm - 7:00pm, Saturday, November 2
Where: Pearl Harbourfront Chinese Cuisine, 2nd floor, 207 Queens Quay West
Book Description:
Writing for Maclean’s magazine in 1965, Peter Gzowski saw something different about the new generation of the left. They were not the agrarian radicals of old. They did not meet in union halls. Nor were they like the Beatniks that Gzowski had rubbed shoulders with in college. “The radicals of the New Left, the young men and women … differ from their predecessors not only in the degree of their protest but in its kind. They are a new breed.”
Members of the new left–this new breed of radicals–placed the ideals of self-determination and community at the core of their politics. As with all leftists, they sought to transcend capitalism. But in contrast to older formations, new leftists emphasized solidarity with national liberation movements challenging imperialism around the world. They took up organizational forms that anticipated – “prefigured,” some said – in their direct, grassroots, community-based democracy, the liberated world of the future.
Radical Ambition is the first book to explore the history of this dynamic movement and reveal the substantial social changes it won for the people of Toronto.
Peter Graham is an independent researcher and sessional instructor at McMaster University. His work examines municipal politics and the role of the left in Canada.
Ian McKay is the L.R. Wilson Chair in Canadian History at McMaster University and the author of the award-winning Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada, 1890–1920 and the co-author of Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in the Age of Anxiety.
Please contact [email protected] if you have any questions.