Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader

“His journey is our journey through the tumultuous and disillusioning decades. He is our Everyman, he is us.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Praise for Tom Hayden:

“One comes away enthralled by Hayden’s odyssey.”—The Boston Sunday Globe

From his earliest days as a Freedom Rider and leader of Students for a Democratic Society, through decades as a state senator, to contemporary notes on the Iraq war, the global South, immigration, and spirituality, Tom Hayden’s writings constitute nothing less than an alternative history of our times.

Writings for a Democratic Society is the only book that encapsulates Tom Hayden’s writings over fifty years, a time in which he has been a reflective eyewitness to American history in the making. The book is composed on sections about the new Left of the 1960s, the Chicago 8, Vietnam, electoral politics, gang violence, Ireland, the environment, global justice, and US foreign policy today.

“Tom Hayden changed America,” the national correspondent of The Atlantic, Nicholas Lemann, has written. He created the “blueprint for the Great Society programs,” according to presidential assistant Richard Goodwin. He was the "single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement," according to The New York Times Book Review. Forty years later he was described as "the conscience of the Senate."

Tom Hayden is the author or editor of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including Reunion and Street Wars.

The best of Tom Hayden's writings from the turbulent 1960s to the Iraq War.

Publishers Weekly

Former California State Senator Hayden (Ending the War in Iraq) has a long history of activism and politics, much of which has been chronicled in his writing; this collection pulls together more than four decades of work tackling vital social issues, from civil rights and Vietnam to genetically modified foods, Iraq and the global justice movement. Hayden writes in a clear and heartfelt manner, turning spotlights not just on problems, but on the commonsense, and often overlooked, implications of those problems: "A country that fails to provide living wages for so many of its young is more committed to its present privileges than its future potential"; "American empire seeks American independence by plunging other nations, cultures, and classes into dependence, which in turn triggers a spiral of resentment and resistance." These grim pronouncements are balanced by a sense of optimism and a clarion call for action: "The times are too hard for us to respond simply as comforters of the oppressed... we must move ahead concertedly with our goal-the changing of society." Dense and wide-ranging, this is a thorough survey of an important thinker and activist.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

"Tom Hayden changed America", the national correspondent of The Atlantic, Nicholas Lemann, has written. He created "the blueprint for the Great Society programs", according to presidential assistant Richard Goodwin. He was the "single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement", according to a New York Times book review. Forty years later he was described as "the conscience of the Senate"