Seeds of the Sixties - Softcover

Jamison, Andrew; Eyerman, Ron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520203410 ISBN 13: 9780520203419

Publisher: University of California Press, 1995

Synopsis

"The Sixties." The powerful images conveyed by those two words have become an enduring part of American cultural and political history. But where did Sixties radicalism come from? Who planted the intellectual seeds that brought it into being? These questions are answered with striking clarity in Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman's book. The result is a combination of history and biography that vividly portrays an entire culture in transition.

The authors focus on specific individuals, each of whom in his or her distinctive way carried the ideas of the 1930s into the decades after World War II, and each of whom shared in inventing a new kind of intellectual partisanship. They begin with C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, and Erich Fromm and show how their work linked the "old left" of the Thirties to the "new left" of the Sixties. Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, and Fairfield Osborn laid the groundwork for environmental activism; Herbert Marcuse, Margaret Mead, and Leo Szilard articulated opposition to the postwar "scientific-technological state." Alternatives to mass culture were proposed by Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy; and Saul Alinsky, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr., made politics personal.

This is an unusual book, written with an intimacy that brings to life both intellect and emotion. The portraits featured here clearly demonstrate that the transforming radicalism of the Sixties grew from the legacy of an earlier generation of thinkers. With a deep awareness of the historical trends in American culture, the authors show us the continuing relevance these partisan intellectuals have for our own age.

"In a time colored by 'political correctness' and the ascendancy of market liberalism, it is well to remember the partisan intellectuals of the 1950s. They took sides and dissented without becoming dogmatic. May we be able to say the same about ourselves."―from Chapter 7

About this title

About the Author:

Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman are American scholars at Lund University in Sweden. They have published two books together, The Making of the New Environmental Consciousness (1990) and Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (1991). Ron Eyerman is also an editor of Intellectuals, Universities, and the State in Western Modern Societies (California, 1987).

From Kirkus Reviews:

Useful attempt to identify the writers and activists of the 1940's and 50's who most influenced progressive thought in the 60's. Seeds resurrects the contributions of 15 people, many now forgotten, whose work underlay the radical activism of the 60's (see Farber above). The 60's can't be explained without a look at the influence of such partisan figures, the authors (Lund University, Sweden; Social Movements, 1991, etc.) insist. They're right: Seeds is a useful corrective to the notion that 60's activism arose in a vacuum (the vacuum the 40's and 50's are often assumed to have been). The authors' choice of figures is salutary. They include ``insider-activist'' ecologist Fairfield Osborne, who reinvented the zoo as a site of environmental education; Lewis Mumford, whose writings on literature, technology, and the urban environment opened crucial lines of theoretical inquiry; Leo Szilard, who conceived the atom bomb and then fought against those who controlled it; and Mary McCarthy, whose frank and satirical writing about women's lives developed the kind of consciousness that led to the women's liberation movement. The book also includes a number of figures too-long neglected--cultural theorist C. Wright Mills, Marxist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, activist ecologist Rachel Carson, community organizer Saul Alinsky, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Inevitably, these activists had their own antecedents. Discussion of such forerunners (Dewey and Emerson among them) helps underscore the existence of a long progressive tradition in American thought. The book's chief drawback lies in its formal structure--introductory material tends to dryness; chapters are closed by repetitive summations; material on the figures themselves tends to get squeezed out (the section on Martin Luther King, for example, is woefully short). The authors might have done better to weave their own observations into writing about the figures, making this collective biography more truly collective. Still, Seeds of the Sixties serves a crucial purpose; hopefully it will lead readers to further investigate the work of the important and interesting figures it examines. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0520203410
• ISBN 13: 9780520203419
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252