Mark Ivor Satin (born November 16, 1946) is an American political theorist, writer, and newsletter publisher. He is best known for contributing to the development and dissemination of three political perspectives – neopacifism in the 1960s, New Age politics in the 1970s and 1980s, and radical centrism in the 1990s and 2000s. Satin's work is sometimes seen as building toward a new political ideology, and then it is often labeled "transformational", "post-liberal", or "post-Marxist". One historian calls Satin's writing "post-hip".

After emigrating to Canada at the age of 20 to avoid serving in the Vietnam War, Satin co-founded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, which helped bring American war resisters to Canada. He also wrote the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada (1968), which sold nearly 100,000 copies. Satin wrote New Age Politics (1978), which identifies an emergent "third force" in North America pursuing such goals as simple living, decentralism, and global responsibility. Satin spread his ideas by co-founding an American political organization, the New World Alliance, and by publishing an international political newsletter, New Options. He also co-drafted the foundational statement of the U.S. Green Party, "Ten Key Values".

Following a period of political disillusion, spent mainly in law school and practicing business law,|group=nb with his radical-middle version, "Dare to synthesize, dare to take it all in".

Satin has been described as "colorful" and "intense", and all his initiatives have been controversial. Bringing war resisters to Canada was opposed by many in the anti-Vietnam War movement. New Age Politics was not welcomed by many on the traditional left or right, and Radical Middle dismayed an even broader segment of the American political community. Even Satin's personal life has generated controversy. At age 76, Satin wrote a book seeking to draw lessons from his political and personal journey, Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics (2023).

Early years

Many mid-1960s American radicals came from small cities in the Midwest and Southwest, as did Satin: although born in The Bronx, he grew up primarily in Moorhead, Minnesota, was a college professor and author of a Cold War-era textbook on Western civilization. His mother was a homemaker.

As a youth, Satin was restless and rebellious, and his behavior did not change after leaving for university. In early 1965, at age 18, he dropped out of the University of Illinois to work for African American civil and political rights with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Later that year, he was told to leave Midwestern State University, in Texas, for refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the United States Constitution. In 1966 he became president of a Students for a Democratic Society chapter at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and helped recruit nearly 20% of the student body to join. then emigrated to Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.

Just before Satin left for Canada, his father told him he was trying to destroy himself. Satin says he arrived in Canada feeling bewildered and unsupported. According to press accounts, many Vietnam War resisters arrived feeling much the same way.

Neopacifism, 1960s

Toronto Anti-Draft Programme

As 1967 began, many American pacifists and radicals did not look favorably on emigration to Canada as a means of resisting the Vietnam War. For some this reflected a core conviction that effective war resistance requires self-sacrifice. For others it was a matter of strategy – emigration was said to be less useful than going to jail

or deserting the military, or was said to abet the war by siphoning off the opposition. and Canada's largest counseling group, the Anti-Draft Programme of the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) – whose board consisted largely of Quakers and radicals|group=nb – was sympathetic to such calls for prudence. In January 1967 its spokesman warned an American audience that immigration was difficult and that the Programme was not willing to act as "baby sitters" for Americans after they arrived. He added that he was tired of talking to the press.

thumb |left |upright |alt=Door painted with peace dove carrying maple leaf |The "sunny yellow" He also tried to change the attitude of the war resistance movement toward emigration. His efforts continued after SUPA collapsed and he co-founded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, with largely the same board of directors, in October 1967. Instead of praising self-sacrifice, he emphasized the importance of self-preservation and self-development to social change. Rather than sympathizing with pacifists' and radicals' strategic concerns, he rebutted them, telling [[The New York Times that massive emigration of draft-age Americans could help end the war, and telling another reporter that going to jail was bad public relations.|group=nb

Instead of refusing to "baby sit" Americans after they arrived, Satin made post-emigration assistance a top priority. The office soon sported comfortable furniture, a hot plate, and free food; Finally, rather than expressing indifference to reporters, Satin courted them, and many responded, Some of the publicity focused on Satin as much as on his cause.|group=nb – flexible, media-savvy, and entrepreneurial. He told one journalist he might have fought against Hitler. or to help eliminate poverty, illiteracy, and racial discrimination. He avoided the intellectual framework of traditional pacifism and socialism. Sometimes he spoke with emotion, as when he described the United States to The New York Times Magazine as "[t]hat godawful sick, foul country; could anything be worse?"|group=nb Sometimes he spoke poetically, as when he told author Jules Witcover, "It's colder here, but you feel warm because you know you're not trying to kill people." Instead of identifying with older pacifists, he identified with a 17-year-old character from the pen of J. D. Salinger: "I was Holden Caulfield", he said in 2008, "just standing and catching in the rye."

Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada

[[File:Draft dodgers being counseled 1967.jpg|thumb|right |alt=Five young people sitting and talking intently |Satin (far left) counseling draft-age Americans in Toronto, August 1967. Until the Manual was published, counseling sessions could take hours. Many years later, Toronto newspapers reported that nearly 100,000 copies of the Manual had been sold. One journalist calls it the "first entirely Canadian-published bestseller in the United States".

The Programme was initially hesitant about producing the Manual, and The New York Times said it contains advice about everything from how to qualify as an immigrant to jobs, housing, schools, politics, culture, and even the snow. According to Canadian social historian David Churchill, the Manual helped some Canadians begin to see Toronto as socially inclusive, politically progressive, and counter-cultural.|style=padding:8px

Inevitably, the Manual became a lightning rod for controversy. Some observers took issue with its perspective on Canada; most notably, The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature criticizes its "condescending tone" in describing Canada's resources. Elements in the U.S. and Canadian governments may have been upset by the Manual. According to journalist Lynn Coady, the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) attempted to wiretap the House of Anansi Press's offices. In addition, Anansi co-founder Dave Godfrey is convinced a 10-day government audit of the press was generated by FBI–RCMP concerns. and Satin routinely denied that the Manual encouraged emigration. But few observers believed him, then or later. The first sentence of an article in The New York Times from 1968 describes the Manual as "a major bid to encourage Americans to evade military conscription". Even a House of Anansi Press anthology from 2007 concedes that the Manual is "coyly titled". According to a study of the Manual by critic Joseph Jones in Canadian Notes & Queries, a literary journal, some later editions experienced a falloff in quality.

historians, social scientists, social movement strategists, and graduate students. In 2017 the Manual was re-issued as a Canadian "classic" by the original publisher, with an introduction by Canadian historian James Laxer and a politically charged afterword by Satin, then in his 70th year.

"The Last Resort"

In the fall of 1968, Satin opened "The Last Resort", a large army-green-colored hostel for draft evaders and military deserters in Vancouver, British Columbia. According to the National Post, a Canadian newspaper:

The hostel did not last long after Satin left it, but others sprang up in its wake.

Confessions of a Young Exile

thumb|right |alt=Twentysomething with big smile and long hair |Satin working on his books Confessions of a Young Exile and New Age Politics in 1975

Until the 1990s, literary critic William Zinsser says, memoir writers tended to conceal their most personal and embarrassing memories. In the 1970s Satin wrote a book revealing many such memories as a neopacifist activist during the years 1964–66, Confessions of a Young Exile, published by Gage, a Toronto publishing house soon to merge with Macmillan of Canada. Confessions is "a remarkable exercise in self-exposure", playwright John Lazarus says in a review. "The insights into the hero's motives and fears are so honest, and so mortifyingly true, that it soon becomes evident that the [naive] tone is deliberate."

To some reviewers, Satin appears to have had a political goal – encouraging activists to establish common ground with ordinary North Americans on the basis of their shared confusion and humanity. For example, Jackie Hooper, writing in The Province, argues that the purity of motives projected by many pacifist activists is unconvincing, and recommends Satin's more complex view: "Satin's emigration wasn't dictated totally by his idealism. More often than not, he talked himself into radical positions ... as a result of trying to impress his peers or his girlfriend, or rebelling against middle-class parental authority". Roy MacSkimming, book editor of the Toronto Star, says Satin portrayed himself as "idealistic" but also troubled and uncertain, wanting to fit in yet also longing to be unique.

Some reviewers were unenthusiastic. For example, Dennis Duffy, writing in The Globe and Mail, describes Satin's memoir as a "story about a young man who doesn't grow up". and Robert McGill in his book War Is Here. Both had been drawn to Satin's text because of their interest in the figure of the "draft dodger" in literature, and both depict Satin's journey from Moorhead to Canada as politically complex and sexually charged. and many movements arose in its wake – among them the feminist, men's liberation, spiritual, human potential, ecology, appropriate technology, intentional community, and holistic health movements. After graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1972, or as a reporter for Canada's underground press. A 240-page edition was published by Vancouver's Whitecap Books in 1978, and a 349-page edition by Dell Publishing Company in New York in 1979. It is now widely regarded as the "first", "most ambitious", or "most adequate" attempt to offer a systemic overview of the new post-socialist politics arising in the wake of the New Left. Some academics say it offers a new ideology.

thumb|left |upright |alt=Line drawing of Carl Rogers's head |[[Carl Rogers (1902–1987), whose ideas about human potential helped shape New Age Politics. He later joined Satin's New Options advisory board.]]

At the heart of New Age Politics is a critique of the consciousness we all supposedly share, a "six-sided prison" that has kept us all trapped for hundreds of years. The six sides of the "prison" are said to be: patriarchal attitudes, egocentricity, scientific single vision, the bureaucratic mentality, nationalism (xenophobia), and the "big city outlook" (fear of nature). Since consciousness, according to Satin, ultimately determines our institutions, prison consciousness is said to be ultimately responsible for "monolithic" institutions that offer us little in the way of freedom of choice or connection with others. Some representative monolithic institutions are: bureaucratic government, automobile-centered transportation systems, attorney-centered law, doctor-centered health care, and church-centered spirituality.

To explain how to break free of the prison and its institutions, Satin develops a "psychocultural" class analysis that reveals the existence of "life-", "thing-", and "death-oriented" classes. According to Satin, life-oriented individuals constitute an emerging "third force" in post-industrial nations. The third force is generating a "prison-free" consciousness consisting of androgynous attitudes, spirituality, multiple perspectives, a cooperative mentality, local-and-global identities, and an ecological outlook. To transform prison society, Satin argues, the third force is going to have to launch an "evolutionary movement" to replace – or at least supplement – monolithic institutions with life-affirming, "biolithic" ones. Some representative biolithic institutions are: deliberative democracy as an alternative to bureaucratic government, bicycles and mass transit as an alternative to the private automobile, and mediation as an alternative to attorney-centered law. According to Satin, the third force will not have to overthrow capitalism, since Western civilization – not capitalism – is said to be responsible for the prison.

The reaction to New Age Politics was, and continues to be, highly polarized. Many of the movements Satin drew upon to construct his synthesis received it favorably, though some took exception to the title. Some maverick liberals and libertarians are drawn to the book. It was eventually published in Sweden and Germany, and European New Age political thinkers came to see it as a precursor of their own work. Others see it as proto-Green. Ever since its first appearance, though, and continuing into the 21st century, New Age Politics has been a target of criticism for two groups in the United States: conservative Christians and left-wing intellectuals.

Among conservative Christians, there are cultural, political, and moral objections. Attorney Constance Cumbey warns that the book can be "seductive" to those who lack an adequate Biblical education. Theologians Tim LaHaye and Ron Rhodes are convinced Satin wants a centralized and coercive world government. Religious writers Jeff Myers and David A. Noebel are troubled by Satin's assertion that getting in touch with one's self might be an "evolutionary imperative". Moral philosopher Douglas Groothuis says Satin's vision is unsound because it lacks an absolute standard of good and evil.

Among left-leaning academics, criticism focuses on Satin's theoretical underpinnings. Political scientist Michael Cummings takes issue with the idea that consciousness is ultimately determining. Science-and-society professor David Hess rejects the idea that economic class analysis should give way to psychocultural class analysis. A book from MIT Press says Satin promoted a superficially subversive but in fact ineffective "new form of individualized, self-help politics".” A lengthy, systemic critique of New Age Politics, by communication studies professor Dana L. Cloud, accuses it of employing a "therapeutic rhetoric[] generated to console activists after the failure of post-1968 revolutionary movements and to legitimate participation in liberal politics". Feminist scholar Greta Gaard says simply, "Satin's antileftism pervades his New Age Politics".

Organizing the New World Alliance

[[File:Mark Satin in 1978.jpg|thumb |right |alt=Determined-looking young man against city skyline. |Satin at the start of his "networking" tour, 1978. Instead, he offered an unconditional "pardon" to Vietnam-era draft resisters, and less-than-honorable discharges to Vietnam-era military deserters.|group=nb

Vietnam War resisters in 1977, Satin began giving talks on New Age Politics in the United States. "I stopped when I found 500 [accomplished] people who said they'd answer a questionnaire ... on what a New Age-oriented political organization should be like – what its politics should be, what its projects should be, and how its first directors should be chosen.".|group=nb

The New World Alliance convened its first "governing council" meeting in New York City in 1979. One of the council's announced goals was to break down the division between left and right. Another was to help facilitate a thorough transformation of society. Satin was named staff member of the Alliance. and the governing council did initiate several projects. For example, a series of "Political Awareness Seminars" attempted to help participants understand and learn to work with their political opponents. In addition, a "Transformation Platform" attempted to synthesize left- and right-wing approaches to dozens of public policy issues. Author Jerome Clark suggests the cause was the Alliance's commitment to consensus-building in all its groups and projects; within months, he notes, one member was complaining that the Alliance had turned into a "diddler's cult". As time went on, though, the Alliance came to be regarded positively by many observers. For example, author Corinne McLaughlin sees it as one of the first groups to offer an agenda for the new transformational politics. In an academic text, political scientist Stephen Woolpert acknowledges it as a precursor of North American Green parties.

New Options Newsletter

After four or five New World Alliance governing council meetings, Satin became tired of what he saw as empty rhetoric, and decided to do something practical – start a political newsletter.|group=nb to launch the venture, from 517 people he had met on his travels, Satin produced New Options on a monthly basis from 1984 to 1992. He wrote nearly all the articles. In 1990 The Washington Post identified New Options as one of 10 periodicals spearheading "The Ideology Shuffle". Twenty-five of its articles were published as a book by a university press.

thumb|left |upright |alt=Face of a smiling elderly woman |Seminal thinker [[Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), Satin's hero in the early 1960s, became an advisor to New Options.]]

Satin wanted New Options to make the visionary perspective of New Age Politics seem pragmatic and realizable. He also wanted New Options to spread the New Age political ideology more effectively than the New World Alliance had done. To those ends, he challenged traditional views across the political spectrum, and he expanded the scope of politics to include subjects like love and relationships. and it needed a political periodical. Satin's book New Age Politics had helped define the movement, and over the years it added such figures as Herman Daly, Marilyn Ferguson, Jane Jacobs, Winona LaDuke, and Robert Rodale.

New Options did not succeed in all quarters. Jules Feiffer, for example, often seen as being on the liberal-left, called it "irritating" and "neo-yuppie". Jason McQuinn, often seen as a radical,

objected to what he perceived as its relentless American optimism. George Weigel, often seen as a conservative, said it consisted largely of a cleverly repackaged leftism.

"Ten Key Values" of the U.S. Green Party

thumb |right |alt=Dozens of people standing and cheering |[[Green Party of the United States|U.S. Green Party national political convention, Chicago, 2008. A modified Ten Key Values statement remains part of the Green platform.]]

By the mid-1980s, Green parties were making inroads all over the world. A slogan of the West German Greens was, "We are neither left nor right; we are in front". Some observers, notably British Green Party liaison Sara Parkin, saw the New World Alliance and New Options Newsletter as Green entities. In 1984, Satin was invited to the founding meeting of the U.S. Green politics movement, and he became a founding member. The meeting chose him, along with political theorist Charlene Spretnak, to draft its foundational political statement, "Ten Key Values". Some accounts recognize futurist and activist Eleanor LeCain as a co-equal drafter. The drafters drew on suggestions recorded on a flip chart during a marathon plenary brainstorming session, as well as on suggestions received by Satin and Spretnak during the meeting and for many weeks afterward. One unusual aspect, say many observers, is the way the values are described; instead of declaratory statements full of "shoulds" and "musts", each value is followed by a series of open-ended questions. "That idea ... came from Mark Satin", Spretnak told scholar Greta Gaard in 1997.|style=padding:8px

The original values statement was, and remains, controversial. U.S. Green Party co-founder John Rensenbrink credits it with helping to unify the often contentious Greens. However, party co-founder Howie Hawkins sees it as just a watered-down, "spiritual", and "New Age" version of the German Greens' Four Pillars statement. A "modified" However, all the open-ended questions were replaced by declaratory sentences, – more creative and future-oriented than politics-as-usual, but willing to face "the hard facts on the ground".

Although Satin argues in New Age Politics that Americans need to change their consciousness and decentralize their institutions,

In New Age Politics, Satin chooses not to focus on the details of public policy. In Radical Middle, however, Satin develops a raft of policy proposals rooted in the Four Key Values. (Among them: universal access to private, preventive health insurance, class-based rather than race-based affirmative action, mandatory national service, and opening U.S. markets to more products from poor nations.) In New Age Politics, Satin calls on "life-oriented" people to become radical activists for a New Age society. In Radical Middle, Satin calls on people of every political stripe to work from within for social change congruent with the Four Key Values.|style=padding:8px

Satin's mandatory national service proposal drew significant media coverage, in part because of his status as a draft refuser. Satin argues that a draft could work in the United States if it applied to all young people, without exception, and if it gave everyone a choice in how they would serve. On Voice of America radio, Satin presented his proposal as one drawing equally from the best of the left and the right. Similarly, the policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council says Satin's book "ultimately places him in the sturdy tradition of 'idealistic' American reformers who think smart and principled people unencumbered by political constraints can change everything."

Pragmatic observers tend to applaud Satin's willingness to borrow good ideas from the left and the right. – than they are to him as a political theorist. For example, Robert Olson of the World Future Society warns Satin against presenting the radical middle as a new ideology. She quotes him:

<blockquote>Coming up with a solution is not a matter of adopting correct political beliefs. It is, rather, a matter of learning to listen&nbsp;– really, listen&nbsp;– to everyone in the circle of humanity, and to take their insights into account. For everyone has a true and unique perspective on the whole. [Many] years ago the burning question was, How radical are you? Hopefully someday soon the question will be, How much can you synthesize? How much do you dare to take in?</blockquote>

Later life

Life changed for Satin after writing and publicizing his Radical Middle book. In 2006, at the age of 60, he moved from Washington, D.C., to the San Francisco Bay Area to reconcile with his father, from whom he had been estranged for 40 years.

In 2009 Satin learned he was losing his eyesight as a result of diabetes. He stopped producing Radical Middle Newsletter but resolved to continue promoting transpartisan and "post-socialist" ideas. From 2009 to 2011 he presented occasional guest lectures on "life and political ideologies" in peace studies classes at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2015 he helped produce a "40th Anniversary Edition" of his book New Age Politics, and in 2017 he helped produce a 50th anniversary edition of his Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada. It was edited by Adam Bellow, a son of the novelist Saul Bellow. Shortly after publication, Satin described what he saw as the book's political perspective on the Civil Rights Movement Archive website: "[In my new book], radical politics no longer means taking an extreme side of an issue and acting as if you're right and everyone else is wrong (or, especially today, 'evil'). Rather, it means listening empathically to the fears, needs, wants, and wisdom of people on all sides of an issue, and then working with all sides to develop genuine (not mushy-middle) solutions that address everyone's core interests. That is the kind of movement we need today, not a revival of the movements of the Sixties".

Reviewers' reactions to the book differed greatly from one another. On the progressive website Common Dreams, for example, Schumacher Center activist Susan Witt succinctly summarizes Satin's critique of New Left, transformational, Green, and radical centrist initiatives (and activists) over the decades. She appreciates his tone of "heartache rather than blame", and empathizes with his final call to create a new political movement of genuinely kind people who learn from everyone and synthesize left and right. By contrast, in a review-essay on the conservative New English Review site, cultural critic Bruce Bawer presents the organizational efforts and personal behavior of Satin and his colleagues as bizarre and appalling. While Bawer acknowledges that Satin was never a socialist and that he became more pragmatic over time, he contends that even at his final, radical-centrist stage Satin failed to abandon "the idea of coming up with grand formulations for social transformation".

Assessment

Mark Satin has been a controversial public figure since the age of 20. Assessments of his significance vary widely.

Positive or empathic views

thumb |right |alt=Stern-looking middle-age man speaking into a microphone. |Satin defending his views at a bookstore in Seattle, 2004. (Drawing by [[Gary Faigin).]]

Some observers see Satin as an exemplary figure. Global-literature scholar J. Daniel Elam, for example, places Satin in a line of effective refugee and internal-exile writers that includes Henry David Thoreau and Richard Wright. David Armstrong, in his study of independent American journalism, presents Satin as an embodiment of the "do-it-yourself spirit" that makes an independent press possible.

Other observers see Satin as an emotionally wounded figure. For example, historian Pierre Berton calls him a "footloose wanderer" and says he hitchhiked across Canada 16 times.

The major substantive criticisms of Satin's work have remained constant over time. His ideas are sometimes said to be superficial; they were characterized as childish in the 1960s, poorly reasoned in the 1980s overly simple in the 2000s, and foolish in the 2020s. His ideas have also occasionally been seen as not politically serious, or as non-political in the sense of not being capable of challenging existing power structures. His work is sometimes said to be largely borrowed from others, a charge that first surfaced with regard to his draft dodger manual, At 58, Satin suggested his message could not be understood without appreciating all the strands of his personal and political journey:

<blockquote>

From my New Left years I took a love of political struggle. From my New Age years I took a conviction that politics needs to be about more than endless struggle&nbsp;– that responsible human beings need to search for reconciliation and healing and mutually acceptable solutions. From my time in the legal profession I took an understanding (and it is no small understanding) that sincerity and passion are not enough&nbsp;– that to be truly effective in the world one needs to be credible and expert. ...

Many Americans are living complicated lives now&nbsp;– few of us have moved through life in a straight line. I think many of us would benefit from trying to gather and synthesize the difficult political lessons we've learned over the course of our lives.

</blockquote>

Publications

Books

  • Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics, Bombardier Books&nbsp;/ Post Hill Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2023. . Strengths and weaknesses of the "post-socialist" wing of the social change movement.
  • Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now, Basic Books, 2004, orig. Westview Press, 2004. . Radical-centrist ideas presented as an integrated political ideology.
  • New Options for America: The Second American Experiment Has Begun, foreword by Marilyn Ferguson, The Press at California State University, 1991. . Twenty-five cover stories from Satin's New Options Newsletter.
  • New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society, Delta Books&nbsp;/ Dell Publishing Co., 1979. . New Age political ideas presented as an integrated political ideology.
  • Confessions of a Young Exile, Gage Publishing Co.&nbsp;/ Macmillan of Canada, 1976. . Memoir covering the years 1964–66.
  • Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, House of Anansi Press, 1968. . . Preserve oneself and change the world. Satin wrote Part One ("Applying") and solicited and edited the materials in Part Two ("Canada"). OCLC retrieved December 13, 2013.

Newsletters

  • Radical Middle Newsletter, 120 issues, 1999–2009. . Originally hard-copy only, now largely online. Radical centrist political orientation. Newsletter retrieved April 17, 2011, ISSN retrieved September 28, 2011.
  • New Options Newsletter, 75 issues, 1984–1992. . Originally hard-copy only, now partially online. Transformational political orientation. Newsletter retrieved October 18, 2014, ISSN retrieved September 28, 2011.
  • Renewal Newsletter, 26 issues, 1981–1982. No ISSN, not online. Produced in cooperation with the New World Alliance.

Selected articles

  • "My Super-Woke Ideas Helped Kill My Former Girlfriend", The American Spectator, February 7, 2024. Self-critique of some of the more radical ideas in the author's book New Age Politics. Retrieved May 29, 2025.
  • "Godfrey and Me", House of Anansi Press website, June 14, 2017. How Satin convinced Anansi to publish his Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada. Retrieved April 4, 2019.
  • "Where's the Juice?", The Responsive Community, vol. 12, no. 4 (2002), pp.&nbsp;70–75. Critical review of Ted Halstead and Michael Lind's book The Radical Center, in a communitarian journal edited by Amitai Etzioni. Retrieved April 17, 2011
  • "Law and Psychology: A Movement Whose Time Has Come", Annual Survey of American Law, vol. 51, no. 4 (1994), pp.&nbsp;583–631. Early argument for what is now called therapeutic jurisprudence. Retrieved September 17, 2025.
  • "Do-It-Yourself Government", Esquire, vol. 99, no. 4 (April 1983), pp.&nbsp;126–28. Early attempt to present New Age political ideas as pragmatic and centrist. Retrieved September 17, 2025.

Selected interviews

  • "Mark Satin Talks With High School Students About Being a Radical Activist in the 1960s and 1970s", produced by the Oral History Project at Crestwood Preparatory College, May 15, 2025. Public video. Retrieved August 31, 2025.
  • "The New Age 40 Years Later", The Huffington Post, April 25, 2016. Interview by Rick Heller of the Humanist Community at Harvard. Retrieved July 16, 2016.
  • "Mark Satin on the Politics of the Radical Middle", National Public Radio audiotape, July 9, 2004. Interview by Tony Cox for The Tavis Smiley Show. Retrieved April 17, 2011.
  • "20th Anniversary Rendezvous: Mark Satin", Whole Earth Review, issue no. 61, winter 1988, p.&nbsp;107. Interview by Kevin Kelly. Retrieved September 17, 2025.

Short stories

  • "My Revolution", New English Review, November 2024. Young political activist befriends elderly pawnbroker in a gritty part of Oakland CA in the 2020s. Retrieved May 29, 2025.
  • "Another Idealistic Lefty Bites the Dust", The American Spectator, June 10, 2024. Semi-autobiographical story about being so dedicated to a political vision that your personal life is in shambles. Retrieved October 20, 2025.
  • "The Three Committees", Civil Rights Movement Archive website, "Activists" section, "Our Stories" sub-section, 2015. Website sponsored by Duke University Libraries and others. Semi-autobiographical story about being an estranged Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee volunteer in Mississippi in 1965. Retrieved May 26, 2024.

See also

  • Canada and the Vietnam War
  • List of futurologists
  • List of peace activists
  • S. H. Rider High School
  • Transformative social change

Notes

References

  • Mark Satin's website. Foregrounds selected Radical Middle Newsletter articles from 1999 to 2009. Also features material on Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, New World Alliance, New Options Newsletter, and three of Satin's books. Retrieved May 18, 2024.
  • Vietnam War Resisters in Canada: Individual Resisters. Provides links to many of their writings and bios, including Satin’s. Retrieved May 20, 2024.
  • Context Institute: Introduction to In Context. Satin was a founding advisor to editor Robert Gilman's In Context quarterly from 1983 forward. Retrieved May 18, 2024.

University holdings

  • Mark Satin Papers, 1967–2009, in the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at Hatcher Library, University of Michigan. "Two linear feet" of correspondence and documents. Retrieved October 26, 2025.
  • Mark Satin Papers, in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at University of Toronto. Correspondence, documents, and other materials related to Satin's time at the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme and his subsequent activities in Canada, through 1978. Retrieved May 18, 2024.
  • New World Alliance and New Options: Correspondence Files, 1977–1992, in the Special Collections Research Center at Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia. Features thousands of letters to the Alliance and New Options Newsletter. Retrieved October 22, 2025.