Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals - Hardcover

Alinsky, Saul David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394443411 ISBN 13: 9780394443416

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1971

Synopsis

Guides young revolutionaries in the art of human communication and explains the tactics of organizing others to work within the system for social change

About this title

Review

"This country's leading hell-raiser...has set down some of the rules of the game. No one has had more experience or has been more successful at it than Alinsky." --The Nation

"Alinsky's techniques and teachings influenced generations of community and labor organizers, including the church-based group hiring a young [Barack] Obama to work on Chicago's South Side in the 1980s.... Alinsky impressed a young [Hillary] Clinton, who was growing up in Park Ridge at the time Alinsky was the director of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago." --Chicago Sun-Times

"Alinsky is that rarity in American life, a superlative organizer, strategist, and tactician who is also a social philosopher." --Charles E. Silberman

"He cannot be bought; he cannot be intimidated; and he breaks all the rules." --The Economist (London)

"I consider him to be one of the few really great men of our century." --Jacques Maritain

About the Author

Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909 and educated first in the streets of that city and then in its university. Graduate work at the University of Chicago in criminology introduced him to the Al Capone gang, and later to Joliet State Prison, where he studied prison life. He founded what is known today as the Alinsky ideology and Alinsky concepts of mass organization for power. His work in organizing the poor to fight for their rights as citizens has been internationally recognized. In the late 1930s he organized the Back of the Yards area in Chicago (the neighborhood made famous in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle). Subsequently, through the Industrial Areas Foundation which he began in 1940, Mr. Alinsky and his staff helped to organize communities not only in Chicago but throughout the country. He later turned his attentions to the middle class, creating a training institute for organizers. He died in 1972.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1971
• ISBN 10: 0394443411
• ISBN 13: 9780394443416
• Binding: Hardcover