Edward Michael Harrington

From Philosopedia

Harrington, Edward Michael (1928—1989)

Harrington, an author, edited Catholic Worker (1951—1952) and New Age (1961—1962). He was a member of the national executive committee of the Socialist Party from 1960 to 1972 and was its national chairman from 1968 to 1972. In 1973 he became chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.

He wrote The Other America (1963), Toward a Democratic Left (1968), Socialism (1970), and Fragments of the Century (1974). In The Politics at God’s Funeral (1983), he declared,

• I left the Catholic Church almost thirty years ago. It is relevant to my present attitudes that even though I rejected the Church . . . I clearly remain a "cultural Catholic," much as an atheist Jew is culturally Jewish. . . . To complicate matters further, I consider myself to be - in Max Weber’s phrase - "religiously musical" even though I do not believe in God. . . . I am, then, what Georg Simmel called a "religious nature without religion," a pious man of deep faith, but not in the supernatural.”

Harrington, the symbol of an activist Socialist in his time, died of cancer in 1989.

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