Saul Alinsky Research Articles

Partners in Forming the People: Jacques Maritain, Saul Alinsky, and the Project of Personalist Democracy

At first glance, Jacques Maritain, the influential Catholic philosopher, and Saul Alinsky, the infamous “dean” of community organizing, could scarcely be more different, in temperament or reputation. Nevertheless, for nearly three decades, these two men were close friends and dedicated collaborators, drawn together by a passionate commitment to democracy. By reading the two alongside each other, this article offers a new interpretation of both. After historically contextualizing the relationship between Maritain and Alinsky, it advances two major claims about their democratic thought. First, it shows that Maritain and Alinsky shared a commitment to a political project best described as “personalist democracy,” insofar as it founded democratic politics upon a specific ethical (and, for Maritain, theological) conception of the human person. Second, the article argues that both thinkers understood personalist democracy to be realizable, in practice, only through a particular kind of democratic organization. They saw the process of organizing as the indispensable means for forming the diffuse persons who comprised society into a coherent “people,” capable of acting for the common good and, in so doing, discovering their own dignity. The article concludes by offering reasons why the project of personalist democracy, as Maritain and Alinsky conceived it, may still have much to offer today.

Community Organizing for Democratic Renewal: The Significance of Jacques Maritain’s Support for Saul Alinsky and His Methods

Jacques Maritain’s ideas about democratic renewal remain as important and inspirational as ever. A less well-known element of Maritain’s political thinking is his support for grassroots community organizing. This support, peppered throughout his writings, comes into stark relief when examining his longtime friendship and correspondence with Saul Alinsky, the dean of community organizing in the US. This article argues, first, that we must understand Maritain’s and Alinsky’s friendship to properly appreciate the legacy of Maritain’s political thought, and second, that understanding the complementarity of their approaches allows us to see that these two friends together present a powerful strategy for democratic renewal. After surveying the two’s friendship, the article presents two insights from their work about community organizing as the pursuit of democratic justice and addresses an objection about Alinsky’s methods. The article concludes with a case study of an interfaith community organization to show how it practices Alinsky’s methods and embodies the political and ethical values that Alinsky and Maritain supported in common.

Introduction: Jacques Maritain and Contemporary Challenges to Democracy

Providing an introduction to the collection of articles regarding Jacques Maritain and his relevance for challenges to democracy today, this article describes some of his main themes and the complexity of his intellectual journey. Maritain played a major role in the development of Catholic social teaching on democracy, and can provide moral and spiritual grounding for a renewal of democracy now. He articulates the moral value of democracy as the form of politics that best allows Christians to live out our love of neighbor and love of enemy in concrete ways, while still making appropriate distinction between the spiritual and temporal spheres. Articles in this volume examine the implications of the friendship between Maritain and Saul Alinsky, William Cavanaugh’s interpretation of Maritain’s influence (with a response from Cavanaugh himself), and reflections upon how we can critically appropriate the thought of Maritain in the contemporary context, 50 years after his death. The introduction concludes with words that Maritain addressed to US Catholics in 1939.

Review of Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race: Community Organizing in the Postwar City // Review of God and Community Organizing: A Covenantal Approach

Review of Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race: Community Organizing in the Postwar City // Review of God and Community Organizing: A Covenantal Approach

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Principle in Practice

This article draws on Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential theory of practice and employs it as a framework to analyze community organizing, focusing on the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky. As a practice in MacIntyre’s sense, it argues, community organizing constitutes a teleological form of social activity that is oriented toward distinctive kinds of “internal goods” and that functions to develop new capacities within its practitioners to recognize, desire, and attain those goods, relying on standards of excellence, characteristic institutions, and its own “tradition” of practice. Such a MacIntyrean analysis of organizing foregrounds its ethical character as a practice and tradition of practice, informed by larger moral-cultural traditions. It also shows how organizing embodies, in practice, the core principles of the Catholic social tradition. Thus, it enables a clearer articulation of the conceptual and historical relationship between community organizing and the Catholic social tradition, and lays a theoretical foundation for further dialogue.

Not wasting a good crisis in publication ethics

“You don’t communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts or ethics of an issue. … It is only when the other party is concerned or feels threatened that he will listen—in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication.”– Saul Alinsky, Rules for RadicalsTwo decades ago, discussions about ethics were relatively rare in publishing. Retractions were almost unheard of. Science was ‘self correcting’. Today, the rise of paper mills, peer review manipulation, and predatory journals, alongside an increased awareness of a lack of reproducibility, have forced publication ethics up the agenda. What has caused this surge in issues and what can be done to take advantage of the concern about these ‘crises’ to tackle these problems at scale, to ensure the future integrity of both researchand its publication?

Saul Alinsky in the podcast «House of Cards»

Historian Dmitry Peretolchin quotes several of my publications on the creation and application of political technologies in the United States in his program about Saul Alinsky on the House of Cards podcast on the Den TV channel. An advertisement for the conference "Russian World Against the Global Reich" was inserted into this broadcast. This article: analyzes the statements of the podcast about Alinsky and his main ideas; showes that the main source of Alinsky's political technologies is the experience of professional revolutionaries in Russia and that they in no way confirm the idea of a global Reich; describes the political technology that Alexander Prokhanov and his media complex uses to implement the Fifth Empire project, which is currently merged with the ideology of the Russian World; analyzes the ideological orientation of the House of Cards podcast and the Picture of the World club on the Den channel. The articles illustrates how the authors of the podcast are working to substantiate the propaganda direction of the media complex. The article also aims to show that political technologies, in particular, technologies of co-organization continue to develop and be implemented in countries with different political systems and can be applied to various types of social movements.

Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank

Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank

‘If you want justice, organize for power!’ Community organising, Catholicism and Chicago school reform

ABSTRACT Since 1980, Chicago’s United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) has been a major player in school reform, organising Mexican-American communities to build a neighbourhood high school, founding a local technical institute, passing radical school governance reform, and launching a major charter network. At UNO’s apex in 2013, a corruption scandal brought its dramatic fall. Yet, despite its recent ignominious history, its origins reflected a vision well worth recapturing. Supported by churches and community groups, Mexican-Americans organised for their children’s schooling, and then trained others to do the same. Arising during a transitional political period in Chicago, UNO’s original animating vision drew upon two main factors: Saul Alinsky’s long relationship with the Catholic Church, and the emergence of a post-Alinsky model of faith-based community organising. Local activist mexicana leadership played a central role, exemplified in the work of Teresa Fraga, an experienced organiser and UNO Chicago’s first President, and Mary Gonzales, UNO’s co-founder.

Conceptions of Power and Role of Religion in Community Organising

Community organising, an approach aiming at building local leadership and empowering local communities, has become increasingly popular in the last few decades because of the crisis of more traditional practises of civil society building and political action. In this paper, the authors first describe the main tenets of this approach, formalised between the 1930s and the 1940s in Chicago by Saul Alinsky, and its history and evolution to the present day. The following paragraphs describe the role played by religious values and religious communities, often representing key institutions in rundown social and urban contexts, in this approach. In the last paragraph, the authors finally discuss the conception of power implied in the version of community organising proposed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (an organisation created by Alinsky) and its affiliates, and the role of religion in it. With this work, the authors argue that the relational and bottom-up idea of power proposed by the IAF and its affiliates, although often focused on the development of a local power base able to place political pressure on the authorities from below and even economic boycott campaigns, has increasingly also relied on soft power after Alinsky’s death, especially because of the development of the ‘relational’ side of community organising, a process where the involvement of religious congregations (with the weight of their moral authority) has played a major role.

Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit's Labor Movement, 1941–1956

Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit's Labor Movement, 1941–1956

Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

Saul Alinsky – organizer of the local community. On the 50th anniversary of "Rules for Radicals" publication

The article presents the life and ideas of Saul Alinsky, one of the most famous American local community organizers. His ideas and activities played an important role in shaping the ideas and practice of local (neighbourhood) community organizing in the United States. He is also considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the community social work.

The Role of Young Men's Christian Association in Community Empowerment Through Saul Alinsky's "Human Power" Approach and Its Implications for Community Development in Medan City

The purpose of this study was to analyze the empowerment process carried out by the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) through the "Human Power" approach and its implications for the development of the city of Medan. In this study carried out using qualitative descriptive and data collection techniques used in this study, namely in- depth interviews (In-depth interview) and documentation. The result obtained were changes in public awareness of economic and educational conditions. The aspect of education, the presence of YMCA in forming Community work with the alternative education program Duta Kasih Club which has encouraged children to continue to get education even with informal channels. Then YMCA as an organizer consisting of young people able to touch the issue of youth in joining and building a business unit or credit union (CU), a global alternative tourism package (GATN) and fostering youth capacity to gain skills (Citizenship Education). Empowerment is not a product but a process that is continually sought to build the quality of life of the community. The development approach asserted by Alinsky puts forward "Human Power" as the power to use human energy, the human spirit, and the ability to realize it to others.

The Community Union model of organizing in Rio Grande Valley colonias

In theorizing community organizing, Saul Alinsky’s model still forms the dominant narrative in the United States. Yet, countless communities do not map neatly onto this model. In particular, there is growing recognition of César Chávez’s organizing in South Texas and, additionally, how this work differs from Chávez’s more well-known organizing in California. In the 1960s, Chávez created the Community Union model, which forms the basis of contemporary organizing in much of the region’s colonias, extralegal communities within 150 miles of the United States/Mexico border that suffer from a dearth of basic services and infrastructures. By providing these basic services and political support, the Community Union model has become the dominant mode of organizing and engagement in South Texas colonias. Through an insurgent historiography provided by colonia organizers in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, a counternarrative of colonia organizing shows the past, present, and potential future of the Community Union model in South Texas colonias. This counter narrative was composed through archival research on the United Farmworkers and open-ended interviews with colonia organizers conducted between 2014 and 2017. Ultimately, this analysis of the Community Union model suggests that Latinx organizing may be marginalized in organizing literature due to their “everyday” characteristics: slow movements, non-direct actions, and (re)questioning of priorities. From this, the role of organizing theories from organizers on-the-ground becomes central: we cannot assume organizers everywhere operate under universally applied theories. As such, it is important to see organizers as dynamic and context-specific in their motivations and guiding theories.

Power and Conflict in the Public Realm: rethinking progressive visions of collaborative citizenship

John Dewey's vision of education and of the school as a model for society was grounded in a commitment to collaboration. This view continues to inform the basic assumptions of progressive educators, especially in the USA. Collaboration in classrooms is offered as the basis and matrix for collaboration beyond them, in the civic realm. But the civic realm is a realm of struggle, and to overemphasize collaboration miseducates students as to its reality. This article explores Saul Alinsky's critique of the Deweyan vision of civic action, with its alternative understanding of the place of collaboration in civic engagement. For the powerless to be heard and heeded by the powerful, collective organization and skills for engaging in conflict in the public realm are key requirements.

«Внутри среднего класса Америки зреет вторая революция». Интервью с профессиональным мятежником Солом Алинским. Часть 2

«Внутри среднего класса Америки зреет вторая революция». Интервью с профессиональным мятежником Солом Алинским. Часть 2

«Моя работа – поставить под сомнение и сломать заведенный порядок». Интервью с профессиональным мятежником Солом Алинским. Часть 1

«Моя работа – поставить под сомнение и сломать заведенный порядок». Интервью с профессиональным мятежником Солом Алинским. Часть 1

The Godless Delusion: Europe and Africa. By JimHarries. Pp. xiii, 165, Eugene, Oregon, Wipf &amp; Stock, 2017, $24.00.Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved? Jesus Christ in the Obama and Post‐Obama Era. By RichardWilliam Bledsoe. Pp. xiv, 144, Eugene, Oregon, Wipf &amp; Stock, 2015, $21.00.

The Godless Delusion: Europe and Africa. By JimHarries. Pp. xiii, 165, Eugene, Oregon, Wipf &amp; Stock, 2017, $24.00.Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved? Jesus Christ in the Obama and Post‐Obama Era. By RichardWilliam Bledsoe. Pp. xiv, 144, Eugene, Oregon, Wipf &amp; Stock, 2015, $21.00.