This is the first systematic, scholarly and sympathetic treatment of the rise and fall of the British New Left. Though briefly part of the upsurge of '1968', the New Left project in Britain was remarkably distinct from the main international movement. This book examines the work of Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Ralph Miliband, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson and many others, who together forged a particularly British form of new leftism from the 1950s to 1970s.

Against a background of the post-war capitalist advance and the cold war, the book traces the origins and formation of this movement, analysing its political and intellectual concerns, assessing its opportunities and achievements, its limits and conflicts, and its failures, while studying those participants who became the major voices of late twentieth-century British socialism.

Combining biographical and manuscript sources with contextual analyses of key texts, The British New Left sheds new light on the development and dilemmas of socialist thought in Britain.