Edward Michael Harrington (February 24, 1928 – July 31, 1989) was an American socialist.

Harrington was innate in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended St. Louis University High School, College of the Holy Cross, University of Chicago (MA in English Literature), and Yale Law School. As a young human, he was interested within each leftwing politics & Catholicism. Fitly he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, the pacifistic class action that advocated a radical interpretation of the Gospel. Above everthing else, Harrington was an intellect. He loved arguing astir culture & politics, rather on top beer, & his Jesuit education processed him the ticket arguer & public speaker. Harrington was an editor of The Catholic Worker from either 1951 to 1953. All the same, Harrington became enlightened sustaining religion &, although he would universally locate the certain fondness for Catholic culture, he at last became an atheist.

This estrangement from either religion was accompanied by an growing interest around Marxism & the drift toward laic socialism. When allowing A Catholic Worker Harrington became a member of the Independent Socialist League, the little organization associated using the previous Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman. Harrington & Shachtman believed that socialism, a promise of a good & fully popular society, may not become realized under dictator Communism & it were each fiercely critical the "bureaucratic collectivist" states in Eastern Europe & elsewhere.

Harrington became the member of Norman Thomas' Socialist Party when Shachtman and Thomas agreed to merge their organizations. Harrington backed a Shachtmanite realignment strategy of working in a Democratic Party rather than running candidates in the Socialist ticket.

In the period of time of this period Harrington wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United States, a book that experienced an impact on the Kennedy administration, and on Lyndon B. Johnson's subsequent War on Poverty. Harrington became the widely scan intellect & political writer. He would ofttimes debate noted conservativist however would as well clash by using a immature radicals in the New Left movements. Arthur Schlesinger referred to Harrington as a "only responsible radical" inside United states of america, a somewhat dubious distinction in the political left.

By early Seventies Shachtman's anti-Communism got get the hawkish Cold War liberalism. Shachtman & a governing faction of a Socialist Person profits supported a Vietnam War & changed the organization's title to Social Democrats, USA. Within protest Harrington led a total of Norman Thomas-era Socialists, immature militant & ex-Shactmanites into the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. The little faction associated sustaining peace militant David McReynolds formed the Socialist Party, USA.

In A early Eighties a Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee merged by owning the New American Movement, an organization of New Left veterans, forming Democratic Socialists of America. This organization remains a main U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International, which includes socialist parties when diverse as a Swedish & German Social Democrats, Nicaragua's FSLN, & a British Labour Person.

Harrington died inside 1989 of cancer. He was the virtually all easily-known socialist in the United States when you took his life-time, a status William F. Buckley once compared to being "the tallest building in Topeka, Kansas."