Studies on the Left was a journal of New Left

New Left

The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...

 radicalism

Political radicalism

The term political radicalism denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means and changing value systems in fundamental ways...

 in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 published between 1959 and 1967 in Madison, Wisconsin

Madison, Wisconsin

Madison is the capital of the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Dane County. It is also home to the University of Wisconsin–Madison....

, and later in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

.

Its authors, at first mostly graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, came to include most of the major figures of sixties radicalism, and not only from the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. Writers for Studies on the Left included Martin J. Sklar, Lee Baxandall

Lee Baxandall

Lee R. Baxandall was an American writer, translator, editor, and activist, first known for his New Left engagement with cultural topics and then as a leader of the naturist movement.-Career:...

, James Weinstein

James Weinstein

James "Jimmy" Weinstein was an American historian and journalist best known as the founder and publisher of In These Times...

, Eleanor Hakim, Ronald Radosh

Ronald Radosh

Ronald Radosh is an American writer, professor, historian, former Marxist, and neoconservative. He is known for his work on the Cold War espionage case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and his advocacy of the state of Israel....

, Gabriel Kolko

Gabriel Kolko

Gabriel Kolko is an American historian and author.Kolko was born in Paterson, New Jersey, attended Kent State University and the University of Wisconsin , married Joyce Manning in 1955, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1962. Following graduation he taught at the University of Pennsylvania...

, James B. Gilbert, Saul Landau

Saul Landau

Saul Landau is journalist, filmmaker, and commentator. He is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Pomona. He is a senior Fellow at and Vice Chair of the Institute for Policy Studies.-Career:...

, Lloyd Gardner

Lloyd Gardner

Lloyd C. Gardner is a diplomatic historian. He is the Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University, where he has taught since 1963. A specialist in 20th century foreign policy, Gardner has held several national fellowships, including two Fulbright Professorships in England and...

, Eugene D. Genovese

Eugene D. Genovese

Eugene Dominic Genovese is an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He has been noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His work Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the...

, Norm Fruchter, Staughton Lynd

Staughton Lynd

Staughton Craig Lynd is an American conscientious objector, Quaker, peace activist and civil rights activist, tax resister, historian, professor, author and lawyer. His involvement in social justice causes has brought him into contact with some of the nation's most influential activists, including...

, Ronald Aronson, William Appleman Williams

William Appleman Williams

William Appleman Williams was one of the 20th century's most prominent revisionist historians of American diplomacy, and has been called "the favorite historian of the Middle American New Left." He achieved the height of his influence while on the faculty of the Department of History at the...

, Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams

Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...

, and Tom Hayden

Tom Hayden

Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden is an American social and political activist and politician, known for his involvement in the animal rights, and the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. He is the former husband of actress Jane Fonda and the father of actor Troy Garity.-Life and...

.

C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills

Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship...

 first published his much-reproduced "Letter to the New Left" (1961) in Studies on the Left. The journal's chief claim to theoretical distinction was in the concept of "corporate liberalism

Corporate liberalism

Corporate liberalism is a thesis in US historiography. Its principal text is James Weinstein's The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State. Other historians who advocate similar theories of US history include Gabriel Kolko, Martin Sklar, and Murray N. Rothbard.The thesis of corporate liberalism has...

" as a descriptive term for the twentieth-century economic and political system typified by the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and characterized by a warfare-welfare state. It advocated a socialism

Socialism

Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

 distinct from the variant then found in the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

.

The journal was important in the rebirth of a critical intellectual life in the 1960s after the McCarthyism

McCarthyism

McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...

 of the 1950s. It was succeeded, under the editorial guidance of James Weinstein

James Weinstein

James "Jimmy" Weinstein was an American historian and journalist best known as the founder and publisher of In These Times...

, by Socialist Revolution

Socialist Review (US)

Socialist Review is a left-wing political and cultural magazine published in the United States since 1970...

 and then by Socialist Review

Socialist Review (US)

Socialist Review is a left-wing political and cultural magazine published in the United States since 1970...

.