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The Ideas of '68
| Article
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13743 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
7,615 Words |
| Author
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Melvin J. Lasky
Melvin J. Lasky is the American editor of Encounter magazine
(London). He was born and educated in New York City and
served as a U.S. combat historian in France and Germany during
World War II. Among his books are Utopia and Revolution
(1976, University of Chicago Press), Africa for Beginners, and
The Hungarian Revolution. His latest book, On the Barricades,
& Off is just being published by Transaction (University of
Rutgers Press). |
What, if any, were the deep, moving, and possibly profound ideas that propelled the movement of 1968, with its marches and demonstrations, teach-ins and sit-ins, petitions and violent confrontations, that agitated most of the Western world two decades ago? There are a number of schools of thought (and nonthought) on the subject.
Many historians and critics deny the presence of any clear or definable ideas at all, nothing of any intellectual coherence, hardly a notion or concept that might with a stretch of the philosophical imagination be associated with the recognizable tradition of social and political theory from, say, Plato to Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. There is much to be said for this thesis.
The self-styled heroes of '68 would not deny this altogether, but they have always (especially in the current twentieth anniversary festivities) put in a claim for something more ambitious and even historic: namely, that as the heirs and heiresses of all the ages, they were able to pick and choose in the supermarket of old cultures, sometimes with reason, more often with passion, always with a new and unprecedented freedom to "do their own thing," to fight and play and love and sing and, all the while, to go about "changing the world.”
My own school of thought, founded in the maelstrom of those events (and colored by my diary of the year from Berkeley to Berlin), argues the following. It was a special delirium that affiliated the firstborn postwar generation, freshmen who arrived on a new scene of affluence and opportunity. Brandishing their campus youth cards, they felt entitled to a weltanschauung on the cheap: leftovers of a dog-eared paperback culture, smatterings of Marx and Freud, excerpts from vitriolic pamphleteering by Trotsky, a gaggle of slogans from Wilhelm Reich and R.D. Laing, the selected works of Herbert Marcuse (or what was told of them in earnest rap sessions), and (since Pestalozzi was long dead) a seminal chapter from A.S. Neill. Out of this ragtag and bobtail subculture, sanctioned by their friendly neighborhood psychiatrist, blessed by the stage army of defrocked priests and pastors, defended by jurists weary of the law, and cheered on by aging intellectuals and poets longing for lost puberty, they went on to the ultimate four-letter obscenity: the homemade bomb. The onset of the darkness unto death and destruction was the cue for the curtain to come down on the "theater of revolution."
In the beginning the pioneers could thrash about in all the subcultures of radical chic--among light headed
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