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Student Radicalism in the Sixties: A Historiographical Approach
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13739 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
11,680 Words |
| Author
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Adam M. Garfinkle
Adam M. Garfinkle is adjunct professor of political science at
the University of Pennsylvania and research associate at the
Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He is also
a contributing editor of Orbis. |
Every generation of youth thinks its own time represents a special moment in history and, in a sense, every generation is correct. No two ages are the same; new times are formed from old times. Yet if every age is special, then no age is special by this measure alone. Certainly, generational conflict is nothing new, or else the prophet Malachi would not have spoken twenty-five hundred years ago of the hearts of fathers turning toward their sons and the hearts of sons turning toward their fathers in the context of messianic hope. Nor would many of the greatest philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, have identified generational cleavages as critical to the evolution of the political process if it were an insignificant matter.
To the extent that the sixties really were different, the reason seems to lie in this: The sixties was an unusually self-conscious decade, particularly for young people. Even during the period, particularly as it lurched toward its havoc-ridden denouement, it was chronicling, criticizing and celebrating itself in print, film, and song. It was a paradoxical time, too; young people believed they were living for the moment and simultaneously making history, the former implying a lack of reflexive interest and the latter presuming a great deal of it.
This self-consciousness has never ended, and it may have even expanded in the last twenty years according to that odd phenomenon wherein memory edits itself in accordance with the needs of an imposing present. The recent outpouring of books about the sixties from those who spent their youth within it stands as evidence. The sixties embedded itself as a castle in time into the images of self that sixties "youth" have carried with them ever since. Political radicalism and student protest are central elements within these images, though student radicalism was ephemeral and extremely limited both in the numbers and in the kinds of students it attracted.
An Epistemological Caveat
If and when that digestive process nears completion, what will have been made of the legacy of the hyperbolic introspectiveness and assumed self-importance of that epoch? Will the memoirs and lyrics and artifacts appear as so much myopic detritus from a time out of sync with the seventies and eighties? Or will the legacy be that of an aborted revolution, a sensibility of liberation coopted and dragged under by American cultural inertia and the weight of its insatiable materialism? Will it be seen twenty years hence as a convexity through which the very soul of America at
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