In the original dust jacket. Navy cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

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A look at the way cultures are different – between groups or national boundaries – and the way they all contribute to a global mass society.

Peter Maurice Worsley (6 May 1924 – 15 March 2013) was a noted British sociologist and social anthropologist. He was a major figure in both anthropology and sociology, and is noted for introducing the term Third World into English. He not only made theoretical and ethnographic contributions, but also was regarded as a key founding member of the New Left.

The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The United States, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Western European countries and other allies represented the “First World”, while the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and their allies represented the “Second World”. This terminology provided a way of broadly categorizing the nations of the Earth into three groups based on political divisions. Due to the complex history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed-upon definition of the Third World. Strictly speaking, “Third World” was a political, rather than economic, grouping.

Since most Third World countries were economically poor and non-industrialized, it became a stereotype to refer to developing countries as “third-world countries”. In political discourse, the term Third World was often associated with being underdeveloped. Some countries in the Eastern Bloc, such as Cuba, were often regarded as Third World. The Third World was normally seen to include many countries with colonial pasts in Africa, Latin America, Oceania, and Asia. It was also sometimes taken as synonymous with countries in the Non-Aligned Movement. In the dependency theory of thinkers like Raúl Prebisch, Walter Rodney, Theotônio dos Santos, and others, the Third World has also been connected to the world-systemic economic division as “periphery” countries dominated by the countries comprising the economic “core”.

In the Cold War, some European democracies (Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland) were neutral in the sense of not joining NATO, but were prosperous, never joined the Non-Aligned Movement, and seldom self-identified as part of the Third World.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the term Third World has decreased in use. It is being replaced with terms such as developing countries, least developed countries or the Global South.

The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era’s liberal establishment, campaigned for freer lifestyles on a broad range of social issues such as feminism, gay rights, drug policy reforms, and gender relations. The New Left differs from the traditional left in that it tended to acknowledge the struggle for various forms of social justice, whereas previous movements prioritized explicitly economic goals. However, many have used the term “New Left” to describe an evolution, continuation, and revitalization of traditional leftist goals.

Some who self-identified as “New Left” rejected involvement with the labor movement and Marxism’s historical theory of class struggle, although others gravitated to their own takes on established forms of Marxism, such as the New Communist movement (which drew from Maoism) in the United States or the K-Gruppen in the German-speaking world. In the United States, the movement was associated with the anti-war college-campus protest movements, including the Free Speech Movement.