In the tumultuous late 60s and early 70s, a social movement
known as the "New Left" emerged as a major cultural
influence, especially on the youth of America. It was a
movement that embraced "flower-power" and psychedelic
"consciousness-expansion," that lionized Ho Chi Minh and
Fidel Castro and launched the Black Panthers and the Theater
of the Absurd. In Return Of The Primitive (originally
published in 1971 as The New Left), Ayn Rand, bestselling
novelist and originator of the theory of Objectivism,
identified the intellectual roots of this movement. She
urged people to repudiate its mindless nihilism and to
uphold, instead, a philosophy of reason, individualism,
capitalism, and technological progress. Editor Peter
Schwartz, in this new, expanded version of The New Left, has
reorganized Rand's essays and added some of his own in order
to underscore the continuing relevance of her analysis of
that period. He examines such current ideologies as
environmentalism and multiculturalism and argues that the
same primitive, tribalist, "anti-industrial" mentality which
animated the New Left a generation ago is shaping society today.
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