A movement of radical intellectuals in the 1960s, spanning the leading Western societies. The New Left was socialist in inspiration but it was critical of orthodox communism as practised in Eastern Europe at the time (as well as of existing socialist and communist parties in the West). Its members focused their attention on cultural factors, such as the mass media and the growth of consumer culture, which impeded revolutionary opposition to capitalism. Seminal books were Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). New Left ideas were influential mainly in such movements as that against the Vietnam War (1964–75) and played a large role in the student uprising in Paris in May 1968, which led to educational and administrative reforms.