New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society

New Age Politics is an attempt to articulate a new political philosophy, based on the movements that began to arise after the New Left faded away in the 1970s - especially the feminist, ecology, spiritual, decentralist, and world-order movements. It is often recognized as the first book of its type. For example, in his foreword to the German edition of New Age Politics, Fritjof Capra - co-author of Green Politics (1984) - writes, "[I]t was the first attempt to not only describe a new kind of political activity but also to provide a synthesis of the new political theory beyond left and right." Some have called its outlook "anti-materialistic," "post-socialist," or "transformational."

There are three distinct versions of New Age Politics. The first, printed in 1976, is the most succinct (84 tightly-packed pages) and is aimed at a largely counter-cultural audience. The author, Mark Satin, a 28-year-old American Vietnam War draft evader, wrote it partly in a free-love commune in Vancouver, Canada, and partly in a house trailer on Mayne Island, off the Vancouver coast, where on clear days he could see the U.S. He designed, typeset, and printed the first edition himself, and took it to the first "World Symposium on Humanity," held in Vancouver in 1976 - where it promptty sold out and garnered the attention of the Toronto Star (which ran a long editoial about it) and New Age Journal in the U.S. (which serialized key parts of it). Many printings followed.

The second version of New Age Politics was published by Whitecap Books, in Canada, in 1978. It is considerably longer than the first (240 pages) and aims at a broader audience. It benefited from the editorial eye of Bonnie Kreps, a Canadian journalist and founder of Toronto New Feminists. The cover art was contributed by Anne Koedt, co-founder of New York Radical Feminists. After U.S. President Jimmy Carter pardoned the draft evaders, Satin embarked on a two-year speaking tour of the U.S., largely by Greyhound bus, with a big box of books always in tow.

The third version of New Age Politics appeared in the U.S. in 1979. It came about when a representative of Dell Publishing Co. discovered that Satin was, surreptitiously, selling dozens of copies of his book at a plant- and cat-bedecked booth at a national meeting of the American Sociological Association. The third version is longer than the others (349 pages) and far more detailed. It includes important new chapters on New Age economics, and a 22-page political platform offered as a "discussion document." In addition, its tone is different. It is the third version that is featured in University of Texas Professor Dana Cloud's chapter in Herbert W. Simons and Michael Billig, eds., After Postmodernism: Reconstructing Ideology Critique (1994).