Union News

New Book from Professor Gary Dorrien ’78

Categories: Union News

American Democratic Socialism:
History, Politics, Religion, and Theory
By Gary Dorrien

Democratic socialism is ascending in the United States as a consequence of a widespread recognition that global capitalism works only for a minority and is harming the planet’s ecology. This history of American democratic socialism from its beginning to the present day interprets the efforts of American socialists to address and transform multiple intersecting sites of injustice and harm.

Comprehensive, deeply researched, and highly original, this book offers a luminous synthesis of secular and religious socialisms, detailing both their intellectual and their organizational histories.

Learn more and purchase American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory (Yale University Press | Amazon).

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of 16 books ranging across the fields of social theory, ethics, theology, philosophy, politics, and intellectual history.

“Gary Dorrien is the greatest theological ethicist of the twenty-first century, our most compelling political theologian, and one of the most gifted historians of ideas in the world. His American Democratic Socialism is a work of astonishing erudition. Best of all, Dorrien is not only a searing chronicler of prophetic thought, but also a bold Christian participant in the historic quest for social justice.”
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON, 
author of Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America

“American Democratic Socialism is a brilliant and timely book. Dorrien offers a big, ambitious, synthetic political and intellectual history of the whole American democratic socialist tradition, giving particular attention to religious socialists, the centrality of race in American politics, and the intellectual contributions of women.”
GEOFFREY KURTZ,
author of Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social  Democracy

“Dorrien is supremely qualified for the task he has set himself in this very thoughtful, necessary, and timely book.”
MAURICE ISSERMAN,
author of The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington

 

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