Carl Boggs

Welcome to my website: CarlBoggs.com

As a writer, I have been active in that enterprise since my teen years, when I began to write for several campus-based newspapers. I had a weekly column for one of them. During these early years I was sports writer, working for the Daily Cal at U.C., Berkeley while also contributing to the San Francisco Examiner and the U.C. News Bureau. I carried my journalistic skills (both writing and graphics) into my later academic work extending to 23 books, hundreds of articles for many journals, and scores of film and book reviews across several decades. Writing for me has meant a source of creative purpose, a mode of expression and communication, and a medium of political commitment. My central topics have included ecology, popular culture, critical social theory, European politics, American politics, and the history of socialism. A key focus from the very outset has been the desire to write for a general public, for a wide audience without sacrificing intellectual depth. That, I believe, is a basic defining characteristic of being a public intellectual.

In 2006 I received the Charles McCoy Award for career achievement from the American Political Science Association. What distinguished that particular award, for me, was that it encompassed far more than academic work as such. The award was meant to include teaching and especially political activism, which in my case meant participation in antiwar protests, the environmental movement, educational reform, and a variety of other intellectual and political activities. One aspect of this identification is that I have never written or taught as strictly an academic, nor have I considered myself a political scientist (my Ph, D discipline), a sociologist, or confined to any other specific field of study. Since graduate-student days I have generally thought of myself as a public intellectual with broad, radical concerns, very much in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci, C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, and Sheldon Wolin.

Antonio Gramsci

C. Wright Mills

Herbert Marcuse

Sheldon Wolin

My political outlook has long been shaped by what might be called a radical-ecological worldview. I helped to organize the first Earth Day in 1970 and later participated in both European and American Green parties, and was especially active in the “left-Green” tendency exemplified by such figures as Murray Bookchin in the U.S. and Rudolf Bahro in Europe. During the 1960s and 1970s I was fortunate to have personal and intellectual relationships with arguable the most important ecological thinkers of the 20th century: Barry Commoner, Bookchin, and Bahro. These and other public intellectuals were firmly committed to the goal of a post-capitalist, ecologically-sustainable society, even where their strategies for getting there might have differed. That has been – and continues to be – my commitment as well.