New Left Review

History

Background

As part of the emerging British "New Left" in the late 1950s, a number of journals were launched to carry commentary on matters of Marxist theory. One of these was The Reasoner, founded by historians E. P. Thompson and John Saville in July 1956. Three quarterly issues were produced. The publication was expanded and further developed from 1957 to 1959 as The New Reasoner, with an additional ten issues produced. The New Reasoner distanced itself from the British Communist Party and USSR in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev's February 1956 "Secret Speech" on the Stalinist cult of personality, and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising in November 1956.

Another radical journal of the period was the Universities and Left Review, a publication started in 1957 with less allegiance to the British communist tradition. This journal was youth-orientated and pacifist in nature, expressing opposition to the militaristic rhetoric of the Cold War, voicing strong disagreement with the 1956 Suez War, and supporting the burgeoning Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

Establishment

New Left Review was established in January 1960 when The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review merged their Boards. The first editor-in-chief of the merged publication was Stuart Hall. The early New Left Review style, featuring illustrations on the cover and in the interior layout, was more irreverent and free-flowing than the publication's later issues, which tended to be more sombre and academic. Hall was succeeded as editor in 1962 by Perry Anderson.

In 1993, nineteen of the members of the editorial committee resigned, citing a loss of control over content by the Editorial Board/Committee in favour of a Shareholders' Trust, which they argued was undemocratic. The Trust—composed of Perry Anderson, his brother Benedict Anderson, and Ronald Fraser—said that a change was necessary for the financial sustainability of New Left Review. The journal was relaunched in 2000, and Perry Anderson returned as editor until 2003.

Since 2008

New Left Review closely followed the 2008 financial crisis as well as its aftermath and its global political repercussions. A 2011 essay by Wolfgang Streeck, titled "The Crises of Democratic Capitalism", was called "the most powerful description of what has gone wrong in western societies" by the Financial Timess contributor Christopher Caldwell.

In the early 2020s, the journal's editorial committee included figures such as Tariq Ali, Robin Blackburn, Mike Davis, Nancy Fraser, Benjamin Kunkel, and Julian Stallabrass, while Oliver Eagleton served on the editorial staff.

Abstracting and indexing

In 2003, New Left Review was ranked 12th by impact factor on a list of the top 20 political science journals in the world. By 2018, however, the Journal Citation Reports rated it 51st out of 176 journals in the category "Political Science", with an impact factor of 1.967. In 2023, the citation database Scopus placed New Left Review in the 69th percentile, 214th out of 706 "Political Science and International Relations" journals, with a citation score of 2.2.

References

References

1. Ian Birchall. "The autonomy of theory—A short history of ''New Left Review'' (Autumn 1980)". Marxists.org.
2. "A Brief History Of New Left Review 1960–2010".
3. "Resignations from the Editorial Board of New Left Review(1993)|万象视野 - 中国文革研究网".
4. Streeck, Wolfgang. (September-October 2011). "The Crises of Democratic Capitalism". New Left Review.
5. Caldwell, Christopher. (19 November 2011). "The protests failed but capitalism is still in the dock". [[The Financial Times]].
6. "About". New Left Review.
7. (30 January 2024). "Oliver Eagleton profile".
8. (2007). "On the use and abuse of bibliometric performance indicators: A critique of Hix's 'global ranking of political science departments'". [[European Political Science]].
9. (2019). "[[Journal Citation Reports". [[Thomson Reuters]].
10. "Scopus preview - New Left Review". Scopus.