Rules for Radicals - by Saul Alinsky (Paperback)

About the Book

This primer tells the "have-nots" how they can organize to achieve real political power for the practice of true democracy.

Book Synopsis

"This country's leading hell-raiser" (The Nation) shares his impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know "the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one."

"A superlative organizer, strategist, and tactician who is also a social philosopher." --Charles E. Silberman

First published in 1971 and written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first to question, this volume exhibits his style at its best. Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.

Review Quotes

"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 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.