Radical | Political Theory, Social Change & Activism | Britannica (original) (raw)

radical, in politics, one who desires extreme change of part or all of the social order. The word was first used in a political sense in England, and its introduction is generally ascribed to Charles James Fox, who in 1797 declared for a “radical reform” consisting of a drastic expansion of the franchise to the point of universal manhood suffrage. The term radical thereafter began to be used as a general term covering all those who supported the movement for parliamentary reform. After the passage of the Reform Act of 1832, which extended the suffrage only to part of the middle class, a group of Radicals allied with the Whig faction in Parliament continued to press for an extension of the vote to include even the working class. When the Reform Act of 1867 further widened suffrage, the Radicals, notably in London and Birmingham, took the lead in organizing the new voters, helping to transform the Whig parliamentary faction into the Liberal Party of the later Victorian era. Because of their efforts on behalf of the working-class vote, the Radicals earned the loyalty of the trade unions; from 1874 to 1892 every trade unionist who sat in Parliament regarded himself as a Radical.

In France before 1848 the term radical designated a republican or supporter of universal manhood suffrage; open advocacy of republicanism being technically illegal, republicans usually called themselves radicals. After 1869 a self-styled Radical faction led by Georges Clemenceau began to drift away from the moderate democratic-republicanism of Léon Gambetta. These Radicals deemed themselves the true heirs of the French Revolutionary tradition. In 1881 at Montmartre they adopted a platform calling for broad social reforms, and at the turn of the century the Radical-Socialist Party was formed.

The English Radicals of the 19th century were influenced by philosophical ideas assuming that men are able to control their social environment by collective action, a position held by the so-called philosophical radicals. Because these assumptions also underlay Marxist theories of social reform, the label radical in time was affixed to Marxists and other advocates of violent social change, thus becoming inapplicable to the gradualist reformers.

In the United States, although the term is usually one of opprobrium, this was not always true in the post-Depression years of the 1930s; and it is generally not true in less stable Third World societies. In popular American usage, radicalism stands for political extremism of any variety, of the left or right; Communism serves as an example of the former, Fascism of the latter. The term has more commonly been applied to the left, but the expression “the radical right” came to be used commonly in the United States. Various youth movements in the United States, widely labeled as radical, were associated with denunciation of traditional social and political values.