ABSTRACT
The attitude of unwillingness to compromise, the readiness to move outside institutionalized structures, which marks the early new left, partly reflects a growing impatience and disenchantment with liberalism. Everywhere non-violent direct action politics was taking initiatives absent in parliamentarist reformism. The leadership of the early civil rights movement, explicitly reformist and integrationist, was concerned with altering the existing structure of law and improving social justice. Reformism was implicit in established orientations to tederai government and legislation, to white, liberal politicane, and in protests against 'unjust laws' or petitioning for the implementation of just ones. 'Participatory democracy' (PD), an alternative to existing forms of representative democracy, based its call for alternatives to parliamentarism, on the principle of a direct, or at least delegated, democracy. Major dilemmas for PD emerged as it was translated from local and regional spheres to the arena of the nation state.
